EXPERIMENTS WITH ART

Kolkata's Experimenter Art Gallery showcases two artists working at the cutting edge of art

Multi/new media artist Afrah Shafiq's first solo show takes as its starting point the beautifully illustrated children's books distributed by the Soviet Union across India from the 1950s to the 1980s, and branches out in different directions. There is an old-fashioned video game that takes you down rabbit holes of narrative and facts around the writers and stories; there is an even more basic Pac-Man-level game where a young girl contemplates her coming marriage with sadness, the graphics taken from Russian folk vernacular; there is an exploration of the work of Daniil Kharms (from whom the show's title is borrowed), a dissident poet who wrote nonsense verse as well as children's books, but whose books, tellingly, never made it to India in translation.