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Max Mueller Bhavan | India Mumbai

Sharbendu De

  • Sharbendu De - 1 © Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, Photo: Anil Rane

  • Sharbendu De - 2 © Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, Photo: Anil Rane

  • Sharbendu De - 3 © Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, Photo: Anil Rane

  • Sharbendu De - 4 © Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, Photo: Anil Rane

  • Sharbendu De - 5 © Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, Photo: Anil Rane

  • Sharbendu De - 6 © Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, Photo: Anil Rane

Sharbendu De
Imagined Homeland (2013-19) 
Photographs

The indigenous Tibeto-Burman Lisus (living inside the intractable jungles of Namdapha National Park & Tiger Reserve, and the villages on the Indo-Myanmar border of Arunachal Pradesh, India) represented through Imagined Homeland (2013-19)— is a sentient community that still retains the wisdom to cohabit with nature and nonhuman living beings. They retain ethereal qualities that evades easy categorisations. By adopting magic realism and referencing archetypal interconnections between man, animal and nature, for example ducks, horses, fog, darkness and the elusive light—the mise-en-scènes unmoor us from the reductive colonial-paternalistic gaze, thus navigating us towards newer shores to understand them, and ourselves.

Acknowledgment: The project was supported by an Art Research Grant from the India Foundation for the Arts and a conceptual photography grant from the Lucie Foundation. 

Note 2: Each mise-en-scène was created on location. No animals were hurt during the making of IH.

Location: Lawns of the Children’s Museum, CSMVS​
 

About the artist

Sharbendu De
@ Sharbendu De
Sharbendu De (b. 1978, India) is a lens-based artist, academic and a writer. In 2018, Feature Shoot recognised De as an Emerging Photographer of the Year. De received grants from the India Foundation for the Arts (2017), Lucie Foundation (2018), Prince Claus Fund & ASEF (2019), MurthyNayak Foundation (2021) and KHOJ (2021). He was shortlisted for the Lensculture Visual Storytelling Awards (2019) and Lucie Foundation’s Emerging Artist of the Year Scholarship (2018) among other nominations.  
 
His first solo featuring An Elegy for Ecology (2016-21) opened at SHRINE EMPIRE Gallery, New Delhi, in December’ 2021. The series dealing with the subject of climate change and human survival in the anthropocene premiered at Phantasmopolis, Asian Art Biennale, Taiwan (2021). His former conceptual series Imagined Homeland (2013-19) on the indigenous Lisu tribe from Arunachal Pradesh has received critical appreciation.  
 
De has also exhibited across Vadehra Art Gallery (2020-21), SHRINE EMPIRE Gallery, New Delhi (2020), PhEST, Italy (2020), FORMAT, U.K. (2019), Serendipity Arts Festival, India (2019), OBSCURA, Malaysia (2019), MOPLA, Los Angeles (2019), Voies Off Awards, Rencontres d'Arles Festival, Arles (2018), Indian Photography Festival, India (2018), Tblisi Photo Festival, Georgia (2018), Goethe-Institut (Mumbai & Delhi; 2016 & 2017), Photo Kathmandu (2016), Econtros da Imagem, Portugal (2016) and Diesel Art Gallery, Mumbai (2012) among others.  ​

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