2026 참여작가 · 인도작가
데바시시 무케르지
Debasish Mukherjee
The City as Trace
ARTIST NOTE
My work traces the changing landscape of the city of Varanasi. The way the city existed during my childhood shaped my early consciousness and remains deeply imprinted in my imagination. It is a place of origin and lived intimacy that continues to inform my artistic language, material choices, and my engagement with memory, place, and time.
Over the years, this engagement has taken on a more immersive and process-driven form. As the city transforms, I find myself drawn to its shifting surfaces and fleeting atmospheres. I have been collecting fragments of wall textures, observing layers of decay, repair, and inscription that silently record the passage of time. Alongside this, I gather the sounds and colours of the city, from the dense, resonant hum of its streets to the quieter, almost ephemeral tonalities that emerge at its edges. These elements become part of an evolving archive, allowing me to reassemble and reinterpret the changing landscapes of various spaces within Benares, as I like to call them.
Through this ongoing practice, the work attempts to hold together what is constantly slipping away, negotiating between presence and loss, and between the material reality of the city and its remembered, imagined, and reconstructed forms.
PROFILE
Debasish Mukherjee (b. 1973) was born in Chhapra, a historically significant town in Bihar, India. He grew up amidst expansive open spaces and railway colonies, mixing freely with people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, an experience that continues to inform his artistic sensibility. He graduated from Banaras Hindu University with a specialization in Painting. Deeply rooted in India, Mukherjee manifests his keen observations of the country’s built environment, social fabric, and everyday life into a contemplative art practice. His work frequently examines how objects and memories are preserved, commemorated, transformed, or allowed to fade into neglect. Mukherjee has held several solo exhibitions, including What Really is a Cloud? at Akar Prakar, New Delhi (2026); The Architecture of Remembrance for the Chennai Photo Biennale (2025); Whispering Lanes at Akar Prakar, New Delhi (2023); River Song at Akar Prakar, New Delhi (2019); and Museum Within at Akar Prakar, New Delhi (2016). He has also participated in numerous significant group exhibitions, including The Legacy of Loss: Perspectives on the Partition of Bengal at Kolkata Centre for Creativity (2021); Multitudes & Assemblages for Hub India at Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin, Italy (2022); Inner Life of Things: Around Anatomies and Armatures, curated by Roobina Karode at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Noida (2022); Partition of India…1947 at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2022); Freedom and Awakening at The Alipore Museum with Kolkata Centre for Creativity (2023); the India Art, Architecture and Design Biennale at Red Fort, New Delhi (2023); Material as Metaphor at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Kolkata (2025); Zameen at the Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata (2026); and the two-artist project Memory Matrix at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale (2025), among others. His works are part of permanent collections at institutions including the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; The Partition Museum, New Delhi; and The Constitution Museum of Rights and Freedoms Academy, O.P. Jindal University, Sonipat. The artist lives and works in New Delhi, India.
