The Will to Live, solo exhibition by Priyaranjan Purkait, philosophizes the artistic strategies in navigating spaces between his childhood memories, geographical location and his artistic interventions in different bodies of works at different times. From the act of repetition in the making of the forms and patterns in the paintings, to the unused patches of cloth as residues for reminiscence of the object histories, the aim of the exhibition is to provide wider contemplative experiences of indifferences, silences, narratives and the act of repairs as a form of resistance in the social structures of everyday life. This exhibition is also an attempt to perpetuate new forms of aesthetic knowledge and produce alternatives to the politics of land and their homogeneous age-old practices. it is an attempt, at various levels, to open dialogs around the understanding of the images of the land, alienation of the artist as a detached yet an extended being and blurring the binary between the abstract and the realism through practice. 

The body of works- part of this exhibition, are almost like the voices of people and the situations have traveled through the time, but yet unheard and unseen in the times we are living in. The Will to Live, in its entirety, is like a fabric in itself, that has absorbed the history of crises, ruptures and the resilience to its material value. Starting from the references, to the usage of un-used, obsolete, fragmented fabrics for making newer versions of tapestries, to the making of fishing nets as a form of the weaving process and treating the pigments as a representation of treads for making the paintings, pushes the limits of what is being seen and what could be perceived.

As Priyaranjan refers to this body of works as “fabric paintings", at an aesthetic level, it also confuses and confronts a reality by provoking the human perception with the representation of the image. However, the artworks may look like abstract paintings in the beginning, but the artist has been attempting to engage with the process to establish a hybrid vocabulary of realism in the making that moves beyond the forms, colours, textural invitations and material significance of the artworks. With an attempt to establish these methodological grounds, Priyaranjan’s practice opens spaces for opportunities to build artistic discourses, predominantly around the dialectics of the material culture and vernacular aesthetics, including larger issues of embodiment, fragmentation, tactility and transference. In many ways, the process of engaging with the production of these artworks which are part of the series, is hugely co-dependent with the artistic subjectivity and interpersonal relationships with the community from the region and furthermore, aims to connect with similar practices, geographies and concerns, beyond the territorial identity of a community.