A Place in Punjab
Orijit Sen visualized, and led a team that executed, a 20m high, 75-meter-long hand-painted mural at the Virasat-e-Khalsa Museum in Anandpur Sahib India. This mural depicts a vast, sprawling landscape of Punjab – revealing the many-layered social, religious, cultural, historical, and political landscapes that constitute the present-day ‘land of five rivers’. Bringing together his years of work with artisans, art historians, and designers, Sen used techniques of miniature art in the mural format — something unique, but entirely in tandem with his smooth ever-emergent creative style. In this sprawling, teeming closely observed representation, Punjab is both a place and a way of life, constantly changing yet also persisting – and stretching out through and across borders, beyond a physical landscape to other places in South Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Punjab is thus a concept, an idea, tied to place but also far larger.
