DEBMALYA ROY CHOUDHURI

Born 1991 in Kolkata, India. Lives and works in New York, USA.

Debmalya Roy Choudhuri is an Indian artist. Adopting the form of a diary, he confronts personal trauma, mental health issues and the “queerness” of identity, body and space. Over time, his creative practice 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. These dual conversations open new perspectives on the relationship between the self and the other. Currently, he works on long-term collaborative projects that engage an interdisciplinary approach towards image-making, engaging photography, performance, and text.

AS PART OF THE LOUIS ROEDERER DISCOVERY AWARD
PRESENTED BY
SPACE STUDIO, BARODA, INDIA

DEBMALYA ROY CHOUDHURI

A FACTLESS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Since he was a teenager, Debmalya Roy Choudhuri has been using photography as others use “I” in a diary. In 2018, the suicide of his partner in India marked a turning point in his career. Originally from this country, where heterosexuality is the norm, and based in the United States, dominated by whiteness, photography became for him a back-and forth between self and other. Mixing snapshot and staged photography, portrait and self-portrait, black & white and color, the artist builds an intimate, melancholic œuvre. A factless autobiography — in reference to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa—presents three profiles made of a multitude of portraits, like so many fragile lives in Donald Trump’s America. Through a collaborative choreography in which the authentic is sometimes colored with dream, the photographer raises here the question of self-affirmation.