Biography
Debmalya Ray Choudhuri (b. Kolkata) (him/them) is a non-binary queer artist from India based in New York.
Their practice, rooted in a diary, engages photography, performance, and text. They discuss 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 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.
With their academic training in philosophy and political science, they use their background to establish an empathetic approach toward story-telling centered around care and respect. This spontaneous diaristic, political, and personal method 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 post-colonial 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.
Their works are in several private collections worldwide in Paris, New York, New Delhi, and Berlin.
Select shows/interviews/publications/displays:
Winner of Synthesis ,Fotofestival Lensburg,Switzerland (May-June, 2024)
Grand Prize Winner, 37th Annual Juried Exhibition, The Art Alliance of Monmouth County, Red Bank, 2024, juried by Kelly Long,Senior Curatorial Assistant, Whitney Museum, USA (April 2024)
Rotterdam Photo Festival, part of Rotterdam Art Week, Netherlands (1st-4th February 2024)
Framing Grief Artist Talk, November 2023 (moderated by Leslie Deschler Canossi & Anthoula Lelekidis, ICP Educators and artists)
Projection night, as part of Der-Greif collective, Les Rencontres des Arles (July 2023)
“Divine Queerness: Forms and Tools of Healing”, the LGBT Center, NYC, and Enfoco Inc (June-September 2023)
Louis Roederer Discovery Award, Les Rencontres d’Arles 2022,curated by Taous R. Dahmani (July- August 2022)
The Portrait Photographer’s Manual, Thames and Hudson (Book by Max Ferguson and Cian Oba-Smith), 2023
Der-Greif , 2023.
Trigger Journal, guest edited by Susan Meiselas, Magnum Photos for Fotomuseum Antwerp, 2022
NIDA Symposium, Lithuania,2022
”Photography kept me alive”, Elephant Magazine (Words by Diane Smyth, curator, writer and editor),2022
From Here on Out, interview with Kelsey Sucena, independent researcher and managing editor of The Photocaptionist, 2021
Angkor Photo Festival, Cambodia ,2020
”Photography as a way of living”, British Journal of Photography, 2018
For an extended CV/exhibitions/features list, please email.
Email for work/assignment/commissions:debmalya.roychoudhuri@gmail.com