Art Projects

Project Gauripur House

About the Heritage Site

Shri Brajendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury, the zamindar of Gouripur in Mymensingh (now a part of Bangladesh), was the owner of the Gouripur House. The home occupies a large amount of space; the mountains are cut; the steps are occasionally constructed by arranging large stones. The 64 stairs divide the vast area, leading to a stunning, bright house surrounded by large trees. It features enormous, tall French windows and doors with charming balconies that overlook the magnificent Kanchenjunga. Though the authentic date of its construction is unknown, it was established as the summer residence of the Roy Choudhury family.

Back then, Kalimpong was a pristine, appealing, and lovely holiday destination. The visitors were surrounded by pine, fir, birch, maple, and alder evergreen forests. The early summers and autumns were especially wonderful because of the abundance of bright rhododendrons and exuberant varieties of orchids. The house holds special significance in literary history—there are several memories of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore in Kalimpong. Between April 1938 and September 1940, Rabindranath took at least four extended vacations here, and he became seriously ill in this location during his final visit, an illness from which he never fully recovered. This period was followed by his death on August 7, 1941.

Gouripur House gave us some of Rabindranath's greatest final poems, including "Janmadin" (Birthday), which he read aloud from this same home on All India Radio on his 78th birthday in 1938. The poem recalls a severe illness he suffered in Shantiniketan, India in September 1937. Now, the abandoned architecture's external wall features a marble plaque serving as a memorial, with the poet's flowing lyrics etched into it. Yet the windows are broken, the interiors are in bad shape, and the structure itself is on the verge of collapsing. Some portions were severely damaged during the earthquake on September 18th, 2011.

The Artistic Intervention

A few site-specific artworks have been produced using a contemporary multidisciplinary approach while staying sympathetic to historical events and taking note of the deteriorated remnants of the current house's architecture. The architecture has developed an intimate link with the abandoned structure that goes beyond just its historical significance. Every piece of site-specific art is continuously interacting with this void, and these temporary installations can be seen on the balcony wall, the fireplace in the hall room, and the side of the stairs leading to the second floor of Gouripur House.

An antique mirrored artwork was mounted on the centre wall of this ancient wooden stairway to reflect the identical staircase. It appears as though the staircase itself wants to recognize the owner of the worn-in footsteps in each visitor to the home. In this mirror's reflection, the mark of emptiness is solidifying with time. Similar to how an archaeologist unearths artifacts in a desolate space, the inanimate house's dead walls are revealed through randomly selected rectangular paper frames. These blank frames are blending into the home and becoming wall decorations, raising people's awareness of exterior ornamentation and decoration to an intellectual level.

A modest clay empty vase with the words "জন্মদিন" (Birthday) was placed in Tagore's bedroom on May 17, 2023, to symbolise the reunion of that historical phenomenon with the emptiness of the current Gouripur House. The project creates a dramatic interplay between light and shadow, where colored glass windows cast enchanting soft light through the dark rooms. A white, hairy, synthetic fibre-abstract protagonist stands in static mode as a metaphor for an unknown story, like the only presence in these empty rooms, absorbing the soft light through its whole body.

In the frigid light, the architecture of the vacant Gouripur House revealed a dramatic and intellectual tone—as if an older storyteller was expressing his own viewpoints through this undertaking (PGH), creating a powerful dialogue between past and present, abandonment and presence, silence and memory.