Take Off Grantee 2021: Devadeep Gupta — Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Blog

Devadeep Gupta is a 2021 Take off Grantee. Devadeep is a visual artist and filmmaker based out of Guwahati, Assam. His practice lies at the intersection of lens-based media, installations, collaborative performances knit together through concurrent conceptual narratives. Through his practice, he reflects his position on the socio-cultural landscapes of his work.

Apart from his personal art-making, he directs his efforts towards creating an avenue in the Northeast India through Northeast Lightbox (NELB, a collective co-founded by him and Hrishikesh Chowdhury, a social worker from Assam), that can facilitate more accessibility towards visual art, while cultivating an inclusive space of dialogue and exchange for art-makers and practitioners along with generating new audiences.

Eyes That Saw Are Wide Shut

When we started Northeast Lightbox in 2017, we aspired to achieve was a platform for shared space for inclusive art-making which would belong to Assam and the Northeast of India. Our intention was to curate good work not only just on the region, but in the region. After the initial years of public interventions, screenings, pop-up exhibitions and workshops, we finally got a chance to shape up the collaborative platform that we had initially conceptualized, through the NEN Archival Project.

Northeast Lightbox had been deliberating over the significance of regional archives since spring of 2019, when we had a residency in Majuli guided by Prakash Bhuyan, a then member of Northeast Lightbox.

*Akhu Chingangbam’s process of recording folk poems.*

In March of 2021, I had a conversation with Dr. Monisha Behal about the contemporary worth of North East Network’s archives in the current socio-cultural and geo-political landscape, as well as the possibility of a collaborative processes that could result in a long-term project working with the archives. Dr. Behal was at the time the director of North East Network (NEN), a women’s rights organisation linking with rural and urban women and organisations on development and related issues within Northeast India. NEN is one of the first organisations in the Northeast to combine activism with advocacy from a liberal feminist perspective, conveying critical gender issues from the region through dialogue and dissemination.

Shifting through the archives, we methodically realized the expansive scope of NEN’s work. In between the inspirations and the constant historic revelations that came as we studied the archive deeper, one thing became very clear for that to look at NEN’s archives as artistic material would be justified only through a collaborative approach.

After the lockdown in lifted in July 2021, we slowly started digitizing a lot of print media that we came across in the Guwahati Office of NEN. Members of the collective also travelled to the states of Meghalaya and Nagaland in order to digitize the documents in the respective State offices. We started putting excerpts from the archives out in public domain through social media posts in an attempt to create a buzz around the project.

The proposal for the project was developed and evolved through the end of 2021 and early 2022. We invited not only fellow practitioners to collaborate, but also organisations such as Asia Art Archives and Assam State Museum for intellectual and logistical support.

*Kumam Davidson Singh’s curatorial notes*

The project proposed a 10 days archival residency followed by an open studio programme engaging the works of North East Network. A two-month incubation process was designed before the residency as Pre-Residency Exchanges to acquaint the practitioners of NEN’s work, their process and their archives.

During this time we also received the Take Off Grant from Inlaks which enabled us to reach out to a network of friends and allies that we had been in conversation since a long time, but were unable to design a concrete framework for the project due to a lack of funds. Through these conversational processes we were able to finalize five practitioners who would be a part of this project as residents and collaborators. It was a unanimous feeling between the practitioners, as well as NEN that the collaborators for this pilot project had to come from within the region who would understand, empathize and reflect the sensibilities of the archives.

The practitioners who were invited to be a part of this project were –

1. Akhu Chingangbam, a singer songwriter from Imphal, Manipur. He leads the Imphal based folk rock act “Imphal Talkies & The Howlers”.

2. Chingrimi Shimray, a visual artist and researcher based in Manipur, India with a degree in Textile Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. She has been researching and documenting the traditional textiles of the Tangkhul Naga Tribe.

*Clockwise from top – Chingrimi Shimray, Kumam Davidson Singh, Akhu Chingangbam, Pranami Rajbangshi and Lapdiang Syiem.*

3. Pranami Rajbangshi, a Master’s student of Photography Design in NID Gandhinagar. Coming from the Koch-Rajbangshi community, she is interested in the politics of gender and identity which is often drawn from her lived experiences.

4. Lapdiang Syiem, a theatre artist based in Shillong, Meghalaya. She has been writing, devising and performing scripts inspired by Khasi folklore and oral narratives, re-interpreting and adapting them into a contemporary context.

5. Kumam Davidson Singh, an ethnographer, curator, writer and educator based in Manipur. He is the founder of Matai Society and co-founder of The Chinky Homo Project: Digital Queer Anthology of Northeast India.

Having known each other virtually over the periods of March and April, the artists finally met in Guwahati on 2nd May, 2022. As the residency officially began, the first stop naturally became the Guwahati NEN Office, where the practitioners interacted with the people and the archives of NEN, that they had previously only digitally accessed.

*Notes from Chingrimi Shimray* *s process*

The process of the residency developed in an organic manner, with each day revealing more and more information for the collective to absorb and shape their work. With inspirations drawing in from archival images, newspaper cuttings, archived films and folk songs, the open studio finally started taking form, and the artists adopted the Assam State Museum space as their studio. The ideas that they had conceptualized over the past few months were finally evolving into bodies of work in their respective mediums in the studio space.

The production week was spent developing the bodies of work. We reached out to local offset printers to help us in developing the print media. Mr. Kamleshwar Deka, a local bamboo craftsperson was called in to help with the installations and lighting designs.

*Pranami Rajbangshi’s Composite – Pictures in her head*

Towards the end of the residency period, Northeast Lightbox, Hrishikesh Chowdhury and I, along with the practitioners and the curator, started developing the open studio architecture. Space curation was executed collectively. Prakash Bhuyan and Kunga Tashi Lepcha from the Confluence Collective Sikkim joined hands with us in designing the spaces as well as contributing curatorially.

*Views of Lapdiang Syiem’s - Ka Jingïathuh Biang (A Retelling)*

The exhibition opened on 8th of May to a very warm audience. The space was charged with intense discussions between audiences and artists alike. The open studio was open to the public for a week. The open studio was visited by over 500 people throughout its course. Many dignitaries from the Directorate of Museum also visited the space along with professors and students from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati, Guwahati University, Cotton College etc. The culmination of the project and the encouragement that we received was extremely motivating.

Further information and readings into the practitioner’s works can be found here.