Deep Interiors Explores Fragmented Identity

 Hyderabad: The striking feature of Deep Interiors: A Return to the (Un)Discovered Self lies not only in its scale but also in its academic weight. Curator and artist Sibdas Sengupta invokes Freud, Lacan, the Surrealists and Dadaists with the fluency of a scholar, anchoring more than 30 artists in a four-gallery exhibition at the State Art Gallery, Madhapur. “Each room is carefully thought through so the movement builds meaning in its totality,” he said.

Theory threads tightly through the walkthrough. Lacan’s ideas of the “I,” the “non-I,” and the “Other” are invoked to explore how artists encounter themselves through alterity. Michel Foucault surfaces in discussions of bodies fragmented under surveillance, while Gilles Deleuze appears in the framing of “constant becoming,” particularly in works where body and landscape dissolve into one another. The academic cadence rarely heard in galleries permeates the show.

The intellectual rigour is evident from the outset. Instead of conventional wall texts, names are withheld, compelling viewers to engage directly with the works. Sengupta describes this as dismantling artistic identity, but in practice, it turns the space into a dialogue between images.

The first gallery, Interfacing Interiority, examines the pressures of built space and digital screens on identity. Souvik Majumdar’s scanned portraits stack fragmented bodies in restless loops, the audio hum recalling a tattoo gun etching on skin. Nearby, Parag Sonarghare’s painted “skin” deceives the eye as a photograph before revealing brushwork, nudging perception. “Is the inner self still incomprehensible, or already fragmented and controlled by the exterior?” Sengupta asked.

The mood shifts in the next gallery. A small bronze object, painstakingly crafted over months, resembles a relic of labor. A canvas titled Carpet Puller captures an unsettling moment just before an incident unfolds. Dreamlike interiors by Mehak Garg stand in tension with the erotic domesticities of T. Venkanna, pulling the idea of home in divergent directions. “This section is about constant becoming,” Sengupta explained. “You transcend to something else.”

The third section, The Self and the Other, makes the theory visceral. The female form recurs through works by Souza, Anjolie Ela Menon and B. Prabha, culminating in Ravinder Reddy’s gilded nude, braid in hand, confronting viewers with a steady gaze. Sengupta calls it “reverse gazing,” where the artwork resists passivity and asserts agency. The psychoanalytic proposition of discovering the self through the “Other” is palpable here, the gaze circling back to alter the one who looks. Alongside these masters, Chandrasekhar Koteshwar presents fragile terracotta objects he calls “non-histories,” standing outside institutional archives.

The final gallery, Bodily Embodiments, treats the body itself as an archive. Priyaranjan Purkait recalls the Sundarbans memory in layered kantha-like canvases. Rija Kalita paints an elusive home she cannot claim. Bhargav Barla’s long-exposure nightscapes hold fishermen’s boats and shrine figures inside luminous, suspended time.

Sengupta declines to name a favourite. “Only together do they answer what a return to the self might mean today.” What emerges is not a romantic search for the soul but a complex, sometimes disquieting set of perspectives. “The purpose of art is to challenge the normalcy of the world order and create alternative perspectives,” he said, summing up the ethos that binds the exhibition.