Sacred Thread

SACRED THREAD

SAMBIT PANDA 

Anant Art Gallery, 2009 (December) 

Catalogue essay: Preeti Bahadur Ramaswamy 

Rituals have a way of investing word, object, gesture with meaning and preciousness. In this body of work, Sambit Panda simultaneously evokes this quality while disinvesting from it the human condition. The viewer is drawn into the narrative of the sacred thread ceremony, partly as an act of remembrance of a tradition still practiced in Orissa from where Sambit migrated to the metropolis. In these works Sambit not only avoids pitfalls, but arrives at a sophisticated language for expressing its preciousness while conveying a sense of distance from this world. 

(excerpt from catalogue essay ’Sacred thread’, by Preeti Bahadur Ramaswamy)