Poulomi Basu is a neurodiverse artist known for her exploration of the interrelationship between systems of power and bodies through work that exists at the limits of art, film, creative technologies and activism. She focus on the intersectionality of ecological, racial, cultural, and political issues experienced specifically by womxn of the global south.
Selected as a BAFTA Breakthrough UK 2024, Basu was awarded 2023 ICP Museum Infinity Award for outstanding contribution to ‘Contemporary Photography and New Media’. Her work has was nominated at Festival de Cannes 2024.
Even though the centre of her works are often women of the Global south (non Euro-centric), yet her art and its histories are connected beyond their places of origin. Her works challenge and revise dominant histories by her tranformative approach to exchanges and the flow of experience.
Basu’s diverse body of work is committed to multiplicity. Eschewing linear notions of history, her approach to investigating themes such as the shifting notions surrounding landscape and the conditions female experience are cyclical in nature. With roots in photography, her practice demonstrates a fidelity to no single artistic modality or creative process; rather, interdisciplinary pursuits that are in constant, active flux. Her evolving, embodied approach to artmaking is emblematic of the plurality of experiences and the myriad ways in which identity is constructed in contemporary culture.
She has become widely known for her influential works Blood Speaks, Centralia, To Conquer Her Land, Fireflies to name a few. Her focus on the intersectionality of ecological, racial, cultural, political and personal collisions experienced specifically by womxn of the global south, such as herself gives agency to those whose voices are deliberately silenced, ferociously advocating for womxn through her practice as an artist and activist for more than a decade. Shifting between mediums Basu often combines the real and the fantastical and has to date worked with photography, performance, installation, collage, virtual and mixed reality, and film influenced by magical realism and speculative futures.
Her immersive film, ‘Maya: The Birth of a Superhero’ premiered at Festival de Cannes 2024 (in competition), CPH:DOX 2024 and SXSW 2024 and won the Special Jury Mention Award/Tribeca Film Festival, Won the Anidox Best XR Award and won the European XR Awards 2024. Recipient of a 4 star Guardian review, it exhibited at a special installation show at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Her experimental film ‘Fireflies’ won the Best Experimental Award at the Aesthetic Film Festival (2022).
FIREFLIES
A Film by Poulomi Basu
Winner, ‘Best Experimental’ Aesthetica Film Festival 2022
Password: F$re32!
Two channel installation, presented here as a single channel piece.
Fireflies is a work of auto-fiction, filtering documentary and performance through the lens of feminist science-fiction to tell the story of violence, survival and world-building.
My mother and grandmother were both child brides and survivors of domestic-sexual violence.
I wrote myself in these various landscapes where you see me returned to earth to heal. I believe a womxn’s understanding of and engagement in our environment is vital. This perspective resists the logic of capitalist economies which places the exploitation of the planet at its centre.
Alona Pardo (Barbican), writes, "Fireflies underscores a matrilineal heritage and genealogy that speaks to the violence which is all too often bestowed on womxn's bodies, highlighting female oppression and the hetero-patriarchal cultural values that are also a shared trauma, and notions of self love.”
Creating a dynamic interplay that transports the viewer into a multiverse outside of the space time continuum —One film is narrative: crash landed and alone, an astronaut find herself on a barren planet where time collapses and the past, present and future merge. The other film is a work of cybernetic feminism.
Using 16mm film and archives, Fireflies disrupts notions of time to locate the work in its own terra.
CENTRALIA: GHOST DANCE
A Film by Poulomi Basu
Permenant collections:
Victoria & Albert Museum (UK)
Harvard Art Museums (USA)
“We have run out of new places to conquer, new places to mine, new places to dam. The remaining oil resources are there in places where it is untenable or difficult to get. They are now coming to those most remote places – the Ramu Nickel Mine, the TarSands of Alberta.” Winona LaDuke
A narrative of “docu-fiction,” ‘Centralia: Ghost Dance’ (which takes its cues from Basu’s critically praised book, ‘Centralia’) transforms the story of a decades-long indigenous guerrilla war in Central India into an ambiguous narrative that unsettles our understanding of truth, media, violence, feminism, and environmentalism within a global context.
The films captures the struggle between forest-dwelling indigenous populations in central India where the coveted mineral deposits of iron ore, bauxite, and coal are mined and exploited by outside forces, including the Indian government. The displaced tribal population has responded and rebelled since the 1960s by organizing as Maoist revolutionaries called Naxalites. In 2009 this simmering conflict esculated into a full blown insurgency, pushing the country to the brink of civil war.
The film draws us in with lyrical images of mysterious landscapes and figures. It is a work of science fiction that uses the very real global ecocide to speculate on the end of the world, the continued dispossession of indigenous groups and the further erosion of women’s rights. An eco-feminist narrative that imagines that the only survivors of this ecological holocaust are a group of women sent out into the cosmos, as a final act of survival.
At it’s heart, the film asks a very simple, urgent question: how did humanity get here?
MAYA: THE BIRTH OF A SUPERHERO
The story of a South Asian girls coming of age and the awakening of her sexuality. She must overcome her own shame and fear to find her inner strength and true super-powers.
With the arrival of her first period Maya’s world is turned upside down as she is confronted by the restrictive traditions of her conservative family and a world of hidden shame, stigma and taboo in contemporary London.
An odyssey of womanhood and femininity, referencing ancient symbols of spiritual and feminine power, the piece draws together the real and the imaginary to trace possible paths to resilience and justice. The Player must discover a radical power based on self love, care and solidarity.
Starring Indira Varma (Game of Thrones), Charithra Chandran (Bridgerton)
Produced by Just Another Production Company and Floréal in co-production with France Télévision – Francetv Storylab, in conjunction with the Meta VR for Good program.
This project was possible thanks to the support of the CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, The City of Paris and Digital Catapult/Creative XR. It was developed with the support of the Immersive Creators Catalyst established by Women in Immersive Technologies Europe (WITT) and Unity for Humanity.
Maya: The Birth of a Superhero is best experienced in a headset on the Meta Quest Store.
Headsets can be provided, if required. Please contact us to arrange.