Context, as the OED explains, refers to “the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood”. A context clarifies, elaborates or enhances meaning. In Search of a Context (CIMA, until January 9) is based on this principle of a ‘setting’ and looks back at CIMA’s show, ReVIEW, last year, but with important differences. Contemporary artists, mainly from Bengal, have been invited to respond to a set of works, some of which are acknowledged masterpieces. However, the focus of this show is on interpretation. The participants gloss, and even appropriate, putting their own creative commentary around the originals, as an editor weaves annotations into a text. As a result, the viewer sees a composite that is more than the sum of two distinct sensibilities.

In ReVIEW, inspired by Picasso’s Guernica, Jogen Chowdhury created a grisly series with death’s heads, monsters and minotaurs. A print of the original was hung unobtrusively nearby. The viewer could savour the power and rhythm of the Spanish Master without losing the focus of Chowdhury’s adaptation. In Search of a Context makes a more adventurous claim for continuity, even for a kind of coherence, by juxtaposing one work on another. So Chowdhury’s collage in black paper is conjoined with J. Swaminathan’s smoky lines and pallid colours, as if to extend the field of negative energy that emanates from the latter’s darkly evocative work. In the process, the ineffable force of the latter is harnessed, and brought down to earth, by Chowdhury’s figuration of political turmoil afflicting Bengal. Faces of the victims of violence peer out from between the diamond-shaped pieces of paper — hence the title, Hirak Rajar Deshe, after Satyajit Ray. Since Chowdhury is the master of subtle forms, one is left feeling perplexed by this sudden punning and in-your-face literalism.

Some artists have simply taken context to denote the history and politics that can be read into works of art. An overwhelming emphasis on political realism tends to obscure a more nuanced understanding of context. So Rameshwar Broota’s photograph of a soldier with a gun ends up making Samir Aich think, once again, of Ray — this time, of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. Jogen Chowdhury’s portrait of the corrupt neta takes Manas Acharya back to Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Even as one sees, only too well, the point of this juxtaposition, it requires a good deal more than familiar references to turn power, anarchy and demagoguery into art. In what way does Mainak Bhaumik and Rituparno Ghosh’s work around Ajoy Kar’s Saptapadi lift the film above predictable Film Studies jargon? One finds oneself wishing away this ‘context’ to simply enjoy the delightfulness of the film, which needs no such intervention.

In trying to follow the original’s idiom too closely, interpretive art can become blandly illustrative of the work it seeks to illuminate. So Satyajit Roy’s take on Farhad Hussain’s sweetly sinister world ends up merely demonstrating Roy’s ability to pick out and reproduce Hussain’s motifs. Roy’s idea of putting moving lights on, and a base to, Shreyasi Chatterjee’s installation with clothes is more novel, creating a world around Chatterjee’s silent language of hanging clothes-like forms, reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois. Chatterjee, in turn, limits herself to creating a field of dark colours around Sumitro Basak’s crouching figure, aflame in yellow and red. Rashmi Bagchi Sarkar gets to the inner gloom of Meera Devidayal’s dingy shacks in her installation with corrugated tin, nails, wood, cartons, bottles and lights. In contrast, Anita Gopal’s papery clutter around Shakila’s minimalist collage of dusky waves renders explicit the inner turbulence of the original.

Partha Pratim Deb and Sougata Das take on two masters of the Bengal School. While Deb pays tribute to his guru, Binode Behari Mukherjee, in the latter’s own signature style, Das builds an altar-piece of etched glass around Rabindranath Tagore’s sublime Portrait of a Lady. Shuvaprasanna reinvents the iconic Chhinnamasta, depicted by an anonymous early Bengal painter, as the goddess of doom and dread. Sumitro Basak, with characteristic wit, places an empty perambulator next to a grand 18th-century sculpture of a mother and child. In Basak’s forlorn installation, the umbilical bond of affection has been replaced by a dehumanized contraption. Arup Mondal’s brass-and-iron figure lies on a bed of fire, gutted and cut into two by Manish Waghmare’s wooden iron. Kingshuk Sarkar places Ravinder Reddy’s sculpture of a beaming woman against red walls and a derelict chalchitra, making it look benign and menacing all at once.

The best work comes from Swarna Chitrakar and Mayank Kumar Shyam. Arpita Singh’s woman with her ageing flesh is appositely framed, as she changes clothes, by Swarna’s patachitra chronicling the seven ages of woman (picture). Mayank’s work, leaping out of the ‘tribal art’ rubric, matches the finest sensibilities with its innate sophistication. Subodh Gupta’s kitchen utensils become figures of Mayank’s fancy, as spoons and ladles transform into rats and scorpions before taking flight into a surreal sky.