DEBMALYA RAY CHOUDHURI | Memories, 2022

The Weight of the Earth is an autobiographical diary of fragility, loss, and desire. This long-term work is the artist’s response/reaction to the suicide of a lover, the author’s confrontation with tuberculosis as a young adult, and their understanding of queer identity in the current socio-political climate as a brown South Asian immigrant in the politically and socially fragmented landscape of America. This work also expands the conversation on the author’s current socioeconomic relationship with a foreign land, its connection to the people encountered, and their collective trauma, desires, and fears, in the hope of finding a reconciliation.  It is conceived as a trilogy. The death of a lover became a point of departure that provoked Deb to create a diary of encounters laid out in a multilayered narrative often documenting the growth and transition of the same people over time. It also encompasses the author’s experience of coming out as queer at a later stage in life, the guilt and the shame associated with living a dual life, the subsequent overcoming of that, and how people express grief and desire through the image and performance. Adopted from the name of the audio journals by the author’s inspiration, gay artist, and activist, David Wojnarowicz who died at the age of 37 due to AIDS, The Weight of The Earth grapples with the often-complicated link between mourning and melancholia, while also raising the question of what being queer means in today’s world.  The author weaves a tapestry of situations, and a healing space for those they met, often survivors of personal trauma and violence, through layers and fabric, amplifying a certain sense of anonymity and ambiguity in the work. In this process, they weave together different personal narratives that acknowledge and simultaneously interrogate the Western canons of photography, philosophy, and semiotics. This ongoing inquiry is not only a personal experience but also a comment on the universal human condition, in the author’s own words- how we exist in this “economy of desire”. Influenced by the idea of a rhizome, this diary constitutes a multiplicity of situations and encounters. These encounters attempt to expand the often-neglected conversations on taboo issues surrounding mental health & suicide, traumas related to trans & queer experience & human feelings of desire & longing.  The Weight of the Earth constitutes the author’s self-portraits alongside portraits of strangers and friends who they met along the way and how through this exchange, they continue to build a greater image of the self. This is a way to develop a fleeting community of people, far from the artist’s homeland- an anthropological game of the artist’s own life.  By adopting the form of a collaborative choreography/collaboration in which the authentic is sometimes colored with a dream, the author ultimately raises the question of self-affirmation and creates a community and healing space in their “imagined homeland”. 

BIO

Debmalya Ray Choudhuri (b. Kolkata,1991) (him/them) is an artist from India, currently based in New York. Their diverse practice, rooted in the form of a diary, engages photography, performance, and text. They talk about confronting personal trauma and mental health situations while addressing contemporary societal questions on the “queerness” of identity, body, and space. Taking the personal tragic experience of confronting the suicide of a lover & the taboo associated with suicide, addiction, and mental illness, as a point of questioning the human condition, their form has evolved from its roots in the need to take distance from the chaos of the surroundings and get intimate, physically, and emotionally- in places where the hunt is more lyrical, delicate, and intense. Over time, this has naturally flowed from finding a sense of belonging in one place to connecting to people by establishing proximity to one person at a time. This way, the author tries to understand how people express desire and love and uses these experiences with strangers and friends to question the complex notion of being queer in today’s broader sociopolitical realm of existence. This approach adopted by the author aims to provoke the uncomfortable questions of identity & representation, the nature of the human condition, and the specifics of image reproduction and consumption, often latent in the cultural blind spots under late-stage capitalism. The lines between the subject and the photographer are fluid in the work. These dual conversations open new perspectives on the relationship between the self and the other. Deb continues to show work nationally and internationally. Their recent shows include Rotterdam Photo Festival, Les Rencontres des Arles, France, The LGBT Center & Enfoco NYC, TILT Institute, Philadelphia among others. They have published works on The Elephant Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, Der-Greif, Humble Arts Foundation, ASAP Connect, Alkazi Foundation India, among others. Their works are in several private collections around the world in Paris, New York, New Delhi, and Berlin