"The Sleep of Reason, Imagined Homeland" by Sharbendu De
Medium: Inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag® Bright White 4ply museum board mount
Edition: 7 + 2 AP
Dimensions: 16 x 24 inches, 24 x 36 inches
Year: 2019
About the artwork
The ‘Imagined Homeland’ series craft conceptually provocative, fluid and transient spaces of belonging beyond material particularities. His efforts to make the audience sensitive to the material realities of the Lisu are indicative of his interpretation of belongingness in the Lisu lives within and beyond the frame. The surface of the prints doesn’t simply remain an intermediary between the audience and the referents, as De had asserted. The surface itself becomes the space where the referents belong. It is the economy of the image that creates the possibilities of novel ways of human and nonhuman belongings. In doing so, Imagined Homeland helps introspect the accepted categories of family, kinship, domesticity and competing claims about them by making the idea of belonging an operative thread.
About the artist
Sharbendu De (b. 1978, India) is a contemporary lens-based artist, academic and a writer. He is the 2022 Visiting Artist Fellow at the Harvard University. In 2018, Feature Shoot recognised De as an Emerging Photographer of the Year. He has received multiple 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 latest conceptual series An Elegy for Ecology (2016-21) dealing with the subject of climate change and human survival in the anthropocene, premiered at Phantasmopolis at the Asian Art Biennale 2021, Taiwan, organised by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and in India, at his first solo at the SHRINE EMPIRE Gallery, New Delhi (2021-22). His former conceptual series Imagined Homeland (2013-19) on the indigenous Lisu tribe from Arunachal Pradesh has received critical appreciation and is currently exhibited at the prestigious Rencontres d’Arles, France 2022 and the Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China.
