Occupying Spaces looks at the engulfment of land today due to rapid urbanization, both metaphorically and conceptually in the works of Ghana Shyam Latua. These set of works generates a dialogue between land as space and how he perceives the process of occupying those spaces. Ghana Shyam is from a remote village in Midnapur, West Bengal. Born and brought up in a village atmosphere, travelling to suburban (Santiniketan) and urban (Kolkata) areas for education he observed the disparity between both the landscapes and this incongruity explains the emanation of his concerns towards violence on land.
Ghana adopts the process of mark making as his language to establish his understanding of the rising change in rural and suburban landscape. Initially scribbling on white or tinted paper where the skin of the paper or tinted layers acts as a metaphor of land, the meditative and time consuming value of the process resonates to the formation of land, which takes years to formulate itself through overlapping of multiple layers.
A metamorphosis can be observed in his later works where he adopts the process of removal of the paper skin, he pricks the layer of paper with a needle which creates a perforated surface. Using this methodology he raises his concern towards the rapid engulfing attitude of urbanization and the violence it creates on land which results in the transformation of the landscape that was once bare and breathing. Isn’t land a skin too? Where will occupying the unoccupied lead us to? Ghana constantly raises these questions through each mark he makes. He mentions “the method of pecking and skinning out is the metaphor of human intervention on vacant space for their vested interest.’’ The scarred relationship between human and nature today is translated visually on to the surface of paper by Ghana Shyam Latua.