The shadow trapper's almanac

Time and Image

- Ranjit Hoskote

“The universe has many paradoxes, one among which is that where there’s an extensive landscape, endless sky, dense clouds, a deep feeling, in other words in a place where the eternal is manifest, there its appropriate companion can be only one person. Infinity and one person are both evenly balanced in relation to one another – both deserve to sit on their individual thrones face-to-face.” - Rabindranath Tagore [1]

I imagine Tanmoy Samanta as a jeweler working in a cone of light, his desk secured against the darkness that spreads out in every direction and has many names: war, forgetting, genocide, fear, exile. Samanta makes images that we may set as talismans against this many-named darkness; finely tuned and delicate as they seem, observe that these images have sharp images on which unsuspecting viewers may cut their hands. The edges of rusting machines that have not lost their power to hurt or heal, serrated blades, a plow with dragon’s teeth: these occupy Samanta’s gouache paintings on rice paper. Alongside them, we find instruments calibrated to weigh infinitesimal volumes of air or sediments of gathered dust, just enough in the pans of the scale to shift the delicate counterpoise of forces that governs the planet.