For Prithwish Daw, the city of Kolkata is not only home but an archive of memory, contradiction, and survival. His practice emerges from the layered histories of the College Street area, where he was born and raised. Walls, bricks, and courtyards are not inert backdrops in his work
- they are living witnesses, carrying the sounds, stories, and silences of centuries.
Through painting, photography, and installation, Prithwish rebuilds the city in fragments. He collects brick dust, plaster from demolished houses, and old mortars, embedding them into his canvases. These materials are not simply mediums but evidence of vanished traditions, collapsing heritage homes, and the fragile negotiations of a middle-class life caught between memory and modernization.
His ongoing series Cacophony of Calcutta reveals this tension: the clash between the past and the present, the heritage homes shrinking under the weight of skyscrapers, and the way middle-class aspirations reshape the city's character. For him, painting is less about representation and more about construction images built brick by brick, like the way a house becomes a building.
At the heart of his practice is an urgent reminder: that history is not only in archives or textbooks but in the very dust of old walls, in the textures of streets, and in the way neighborhoods breathe. Within the frame of the "empty box," Prithwish invites viewers to enter Kolkata itself to hear its echoes, to feel its erosion, and to confront what it means when memory survives only in fragments.
