One of the popular festivals of Bengal is Durga puja which will take place within few days. In this festive season Kalakriti Art Gallery presents a show named Shakti with twenty three artists. This is an attempt to showcase the amazing harmony of the metamorphic visualization and the traditional religious faiths to our deity.
Today we live always with an anxiety due to the varied form of devastation occurring dayto day. A kind of unknown trauma follows our footsteps. Sometime it strikes our ego and reminds us how helpless we are. But apart from that each and every year everyone eagerly waits for this festival. Because when She comes brings with Her hope and happiness for Her numerous devotees. It is our most aspiring festival also where Durga the deity washes away all the sins from the earth through the assassination of Mahishasura the demon. The chronological development of civilization shows that man realized the necessity of energy and strength for survival and self-protection, collectively and individually in the daily pursuit of life. Through energy and strength he gained respect, honour and applause in society since Indus Valley civilization.
Generally the word Shakti interprets power, strength, energy etc. It also symbolizes as a feminine energy. The word Shakti is both the symbol of fertility as well as ferocity. It is a synonym of Parvati, Durga and Kali. Devotees believe the whole cosmos to be a revelation of Shakti . We find many of the feminine deities of the Vedas and the Upanishads gradually becoming the Supreme Goddesses in the Puranas and the Tantras. The initial term applied to the divine feminine, which still retains its popular usage, as Shakti.
The Shakti has fostered a popular synthesis of such apparently conflicting philosophies as Sankhya, Vedanta, Vaishnavism, and Tantra. The Sankhya speaks of Purusha and Prakriti as two independent ultimate realities whose interaction is of the nature of an object and its witness, the accidental contact of Prakriti being a mere attribution on the unattached Purusha. In the Puranas and related popular religious literature Prakriti is plainly conceived of as Purusha s female counterpart, and the Prakriti and Purusha of the Sankhyas become identified with Shakti and Shiva in the Tantras. Similarly, in Vedanta the principle of Maya is viewed as the Shakti of Brahman. In later popular religious traditions these pairs came to be identified with such deities as Vishnu and Radha.
So, the concept of Shakti is deeply rooted in our traditional religious belief since long times. John Keats said Beauty is truth, Truth is beauty . Very true; here the beauty is transcendent into the form of shakti, the power- an abstract entity. And this mode of abstraction is diversified into a creative truthfulness through the participant artists of this exhibition. Ganesh Pyne, Jogen Chowdhury, S.H.Raza, Suhas Roy, Suvaprasanna Bhattacharya, Avijit Dutta, Sanjay Bhattacharya, Chandra Bhattacharya, K.Murlidharan, Ashok Mullick, Shipra Bhattacharya, Dipak Banerjee, Sisir Sahara, Subrata Gangopadhyay, A Rajeswara Rao, Seema Kohil, Sachin Jaltare, Biswajit Saha, Dilip Chowdhury, R.G.Goud, Niren SenGupta, Manoj Dutta and Gogi Saroj Pal; all of these artist express their views and thoughts in their own way through the graceful representation of forms and artistic imagery.
During this exhibition Kalakriti Art Gallery gives us a chance to explore the vivid mode of expression concerning Shakti where the fusion of myth, tradition and perception of individual artist s makes a new paradigm to replicate this creative force.
Arpita Pradhan