Ravindra Dutt has transformed the images of Mughal era into a collage of creativity
Timeless: Dutt's work, The Great Black Erection
Keeping in mind that all history is constructed from a relatively small selection of memories, artefacts and material remains chosen from a large universe, Ravindra Dutt’s project Flaneur in old Delhi is a document based of images of the past, mainly the Mughal past, re-presented in a collage form. The collation of images itself is partakes in the act of creating a new image, in which the choice and placement of the same are privileged by the artist to represent a concept, thought or ideological framework.
The artist here juxtaposes vignettes from the history of a city as recorded in miniature paintings and old photographs; through these he seeks to create a document of experiences and memories of other times and other people. He even attempts to weave networks of interconnective histories of emperors and their dominions through illustration of geographically and architecturally diverse photographs of sites and buildings related to the Mughal dynasty ranging from Lahore fort to Chasme Shahi, the pleasure gardens in Srinagar.
The temporal and spatial dimensions are therefore layered in his works such as Memoirs of a Travelling DNA where colonial photographs of monuments built at least a couple of centuries prior to the current work are being digitally reframed on a specially constructed medieval landscape by an artist in 2014.
One sees similar re-working of the significance of artefacts such as a Mughal Astrolabora Sarpench, a turban ornament worn by Emperors as a mark of sovereignty and royalty, in which the Dutt has replaced the precious and semi precious jewels with images from the era in which the ornament was originally created. There is a conscious re-use of historical images and their re-location from the court to the museum and finally now in Dutt’s prints and digigraphs.
Dutt has tried to preserve a vintage look in his works, which are constituted by archival prints on canvas or Hahnemuele paper and also by using maps, landscapes and historical stones in the background.
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