Rathin Barman

Rathin Barman (b. 1981, Tripura, India) lives and works in Kolkata, India. Education: 2010 Master of Fine Arts, Faculty of Visual Arts, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata; 2008 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Faculty of Visual Arts, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata.

Select solo and group exhibitions include (Un)Settled, Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata (2024); Unsettled Structures, The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago (2023); Eyes of the Skin, Experimenter – Colaba, Mumbai (2023); There is Now a Wall, Experimenter – Hindustan Road, Kolkata (2022); Inner Life of Things: Around Anatomies and Armatures, Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts, Noida (2022); 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10), Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2021); Drawing Salon at On Site, Bikaner House, New Delhi (2021); Dimensional Distortion, Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata (2020); City Tales, Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts, New Delhi (2020); The Thinking Forest is Not a Metaphor, Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata (2019); Deeper within its Silence, Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi (2019); By All Estimates, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Arts, Sydney (2019); Searching for Stars Amongst the Crescents, Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata (2019); Burnish/Tarnish, Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi (2019); I Wish to Let You Fall Out of My Hands (Chapter II), Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata (2018); Home, and a Home, Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2016); Raster – Emerging from the Grid, Experimenter – Hindustan Road, Kolkata (2016); No ... I Remember It Well, Experimenter – Hindustan Road, Kolkata (2015); Land of No Horizon – II, Experimenter – Hindustan Road, Kolkata (2015); A House With A View, Kochi-Muziris Biennale Collateral Project, Kochi (2014); Landscape from Memory (Situation 1), Dhaka Art Summit (2014); A Goldfish Bowl, GALLERYSKE, Bangalore (2014); Urban Utopia, Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata (2014); Midnight’s Grandchildren, Studio X, Mumbai (2014); Land of No Horizon, Nature Morte (in association with Experimenter), New Delhi (2014); Untitled, de Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Massachusetts, US (2012); And My Eyes Fill With Sand..., Experimenter – Hindustan Road, Kolkata (2011); Involvement with Green & White, Sandarbh, Rajasthan (2011); The Why Not Place Residency Show, Religare Art Initiative, New Delhi (2011); Unbounded, Gallery Kolkata, Kolkata (2010), among others.

About The Work

Courtesy of Experimenter, Kolkata

Untitled, 2019

Anecdote, insight, and memory play a crucial role in Rathin Barman’s practice. He assimilates memories, building fragile scaffoldings of connections between the architecture of the homes and the people who live in them. The suspended sculpture reimagines the floor pattern of a house that Barman had deeply researched in his ongoing projects within the century-old homes in North Kolkata—elevating it above the viewer’s head where it floats as both floor and ceiling. Exploring the precise conjunction of the disembodiment of the built form, it also imagines the simultaneous renewal of future possibilities that are integral to Barman’s practice. The sculpture underscores how Barman uses architecture and the built environment as an anthropological tool to reflect on generational memory, and ideas of home and belonging.

One, and the other, 2016

For over a decade, Rathin Barman has been exploring the nature of built structures and what lies beyond the visible. Applying anecdotal and factual information through long-form interviews, Barman forms long-lasting relationships with inhabitants of old homes in North Kolkata, which are in various stages of disrepair, and demolition and have long lost their past grandeur, and makes sculptures based on his interviewees' conflicting responses. These homes are, in effect, polycentric, since most of these structures are interlocked and inseparable, and so are their people and their personal histories and relationships with each other. Barman explores this polycentrism of relationships through One, and the other, a body of sculptures in construction materials of concrete, steel, and brass. 