The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 48 (clockwise from opposite) Restructured Living Spaces (detail) 2021 120 concrete panels with brass inlay and dry pastel / 325 x 610 x 2.5cm (approx., overall) Notes from Lived Spaces 16 2021 Cast concrete and pigments / 20 x 16 x 30–40cm (approx.) Reference image for Restructured Living Spaces 2021 Images courtesy: The artist and Experimenter, Kolkata Every house is like a forest. It has its own unique ecology, with people from different parts of the subcontinent living and growing together with the architecture that is also constantly growing and aging organically. Rathin Barman 1 Kolkata’s extraordinary history has left unique strata of cultural influences and hybridisation. It was the capital of British India until 1911, from which time grand colonial mansions and civic buildings remain. The city also came to be known as the intellectual centre of the subcontinent and a pillar of the Independence movement, before becoming the most populous city in India until the 1980s — an immense cosmopolis, drawing communities from around the nation and the world. The post-Partition period also saw the outward migration of Bengalis, who left old family homes abandoned —many of which were then occupied by migrants from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and from villages of West Bengal. Among these many arrivals, some multi-generational families have been living as tenants in old houses for more than half a century. 3 Rathin Barman gathers stories of migration and home-building to study the social fabric of the city, bringing idiosyncrasies ingrained in urban architectures to the surface. From his home of Kolkata, India, he views the city as a political phenomenon, reflecting many ideologies and sociopolitical points of view that manifest in constantly evolving urban landscapes. 2 Barman was born in the Indian state of Tripura, an area surrounded on three sides by Bangladesh. Like many people from the border region, his family survived migration and separation, as Bengal was carved up — first in the partition of 1905 enforced by the British Raj, and subsequently in the 1947 Partition of India. Such movements and settlements have informed a large part of Barman’s work, as the basis for his investigation of urban transformations within his hometown. Barman spends time in migrant neighbourhoods, researching the history and transformations of buildings and gathering stories from families and communities for his works. In particular, he considers how ambiguous ownership and tenancy structures result in hybrid communities occupying buildings in different ways, leaving visible traces in the architecture. In the resulting sculptures, Barman combines everyday industrial materials, such as concrete and steel, with more precious materials, such as polished brass, which reflect transformations in buildings as they evolve through aspirations of grandeur, clandestine adaptation and changes of economic necessity. Barman’s largest concrete work to date, Restructured Living Spaces 2021, focuses on a grand house built in the 1930s in Goabagan, Northern Kolkata. It was built in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood for a Bengali family who moved to Mumbai and Delhi in the 1960s and never returned. Sections of the house were then occupied by families displaced from East Pakistan and other families who migrated from villages of West Bengal, including one that recently sub-leased part of the house. As if making a life-size architectural rendering, Barman traces the lines of the facades and interiors of the building in inlaid brass, overlaying changes in the designs throughout the building’s history and highlighting peculiarities of its renovated architectures. Like other works in the ongoing series, Barman illustrates the layering of social history instilled in the structure, as people bring their cultures and beliefs into their homes, redesigning and reorientating the architecture to cater for their own daily needs and cultural practices. In maquette-size cast concrete blocks, Barman also details old houses situated in business areas that have surreptitiously leased part of their homes — mostly ground floors facing the road — for commercial use. These are rapidly transformed into shops, storage spaces and even small factory units; in some cases, small shopfronts have been added to protrude from the original structures. The ‘Notes from Lived Spaces’ series 2021 detaches these architectural anomalies into small vignette studies, which Barman considers ‘a collection of notes from such restructured spaces’. 4 From monumental installations to small, detailed sculptures, Barman’s works contemplate the nuances ingrained in urban structures as they evolve from the design of a particular vernacular period to those of syncretic local cultures, in response to developing social needs. Tarun Nagesh Endnotes 1 Rathin Barman, artist statement, emailed to the author, 1 June 2021. 2 ‘Bio/CV’, Rathin Barman <https://rathinbarman.weebly.com/biocv.html >, viewed June 2021. 3 Barman. 4 Barman. Rathin Barman Born 1981, Tripura, India Lives and works in Kolkata, India