Innovative Curatorial Projects – Paris / SingaporeDebkamal Ganguly
*Kolkata, India. Lives and works in Kolkata, India.
After getting a Master in Geology, Debkamal Ganguly studied at one of the leading film schools in India, the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata where he graduated in 2000. His film learning has opened for himself a widening gap between film practice and film scholarship. He wants to reconcile these two disciplines through his practice. As a son of parents who were direct victims of the partition of India in 1947 the notion of ancestral land is an elusive notion for him and maybe a reason for his interest in moving spaces and frames. As a conscious practitioner of video and film, he acts as an editor, script-writer, sound designer and overall creative collaborator and was awarded for his collaboration on Vipin Vijay’s Video Game with the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2007. Beside his artistic activities Debkamal is also an independent researcher on various topics of popular Indian media culture. His current projects include a research project on early Indian cinema and in particular the silent era, as well as a video work on one of the most challenging Bengali writers of 20th century, Kamal Kumar Majumdar. His récent creation Videodrone is a part of the Video Art section of the Indian Highway exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2008/2009.
Space bar (work in 'progress') / India / 2008 / 20'45 / 4:3
The video is part of a long tradition of words examining urban sprawl, in a manner composed of non-urban space and the relationship to the sacred-mythological places, but that also secularizes those spaces, finding new frames for myth and metaphor. The artist presents the perception of these other created spaces through electronic and digital mediums, the shaping of phantasmagoric space Hallucination, and Google Earth. Beyond this, Debkamal questions how a film maker should tackle, draw and register the countryside.