BAWWABA, BOOTH W – 6
Preview: 28 - 29 February 2024
Dates: 1 - 3 March 2024
Venue: Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai - United Arab Emirates
Emami Art will be showcasing 𝗗𝗲𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗵𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗣𝗮𝘂𝗹 in a solo presentation at the seventeenth edition of the Middle East's leading international art fair, Art Dubai 2024, BAWWABA Section, curated by Emiliano Valdés.
Landscapes and rivers are integral to Paul’s narrative, express complex emotions and symbolic connections. However, the landscape is a site of enlightenment and healing in his works. Water bodies, especially rivers, reflect the fluidity of their inner self and the body, which is sedimented with memories and time.
The presentation will exhibit multi-disciplinary artist Debashish Paul's new drawings and photographs along with a sculptural costume and headdress from a recent performance. Independently or as part of his sculptural dresses, drawings are essential to his practice. They are made from paper pasted on fabric with drawings that carry visual lexicons of his memories, self, stories and imaginations of body and intimate things. Site-specific photography is an extended part of his practice, where he appears in sculptural dresses, signifying certain connections and elements relating to the place and theme of his performance. The body and landscape in the photographs on view, blend in, resonating with each other. Paul's unique multi expressionist practice is devised through dialogues with the self, society and nature.
Paul will also be performing live Scent of the Celestial Garden, Commissioned by Art Dubai, 2024 - a new piece that will debut on 28 February, Sundown, at Water Terrace, Madinat Jumeirah followed by a second performance on 3rd March.
The Scent of the Celestial Garden is a new piece by Paul debuting in the 2024 edition of Art Dubai. It purports to celebrate happiness and rejuvenation. For Paul, a garden is a speculative space where aspirations, hopes, and desires intertwine, and the concept of scent is a reminder that in the depths of his internal existence, there exists a source of inspiration and a connection to something greater. His devising of symbolic images through sounds and scents, body movements along with the shape of his sculpturesque attire, fosters a collective aspiration for the higher realms of existence – utopic and ecstatic. Through the amalgamation of the natural and heavenly, and with his mastery of form and movement, he is set to beckon his surroundings into a liminal space where the terrestrial and ethereal converge. Although his performances have no connection to any rituals, there is a distinctive ‘ritual quality or effect’ the onlookers have an elevated experience of time that separates them, for a moment, from the mundane everydayness in which they live.
