The Cabinet of Curiosities series by Kaushik Saha collects and reframes the ordinary so that the everyday becomes worthy of scrutiny, wonder, and slow attention. Working across compact layered acrylic and the occasional embedded fragment, Saha composes intimate fields that act like miniature archives: discrete objects of observation that, when arranged together, form an ecosystem of memory, labour, and place. These works refuse grand narrative and instead accumulate—the way a drawer collects small things over years—offering a method of seeing that privileges detail, residue, and the quiet poetry of materials.
If the historic room of wonder placed objects side-by-side to provoke curiosity and to compress the world into a contained cosmology, Saha’s Cabinet does the inverse: it plants the cosmological in the modest and the overlooked. Each panel reads at once as an index and an argument. Index because traces—smudges, scraped ground, threaded marks—register the history of making; argument because the accumulation of small gestures refuses easy legibility, insisting instead on perceptual labour from the viewer. The series asks: what kinds of histories are stored in kitchen drawers, in roadside detritus, in the rhythmic marks of daily work?
And how might the careful rearrangement of such traces reopen that hidden life for public consideration? Curatorial reflection on Saha’s practice locates the Cabinet series within a larger contemporary turn toward micro-archives and the politics of attention. In an era saturated with monumental images and seamless digital surfaces, the small object becomes a formal strategy for resisting the flattened temporality of screens. Saha’s work redirects the viewer away from the instantaneous scroll and toward the slow work of reading the surface. This is an act of political seeing: to linger on texture is to notice accumulation, to register attrition, to begin to read the social histories embedded in everyday things. The Cabinet thereby becomes a counter-archive that privileges persistence over spectacle.