© Satadru Sovan Banduri
Prof. Satadru Sovan Banduri is one of the four artists who chose this edition and the last of the four to step into The Long View. He paints, makes installations of light and performs with his own body as the material. Here he tells us what his work carries and what young artists should never stop doing.
Introduction
He paints, he makes installations of light and he performs. In his performances, his own body is the material. He has made more than 120 of them in many countries.
He was a Fulbright Scholar in the Digital Arts and New Media programme at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has had 11 solo shows. His work has been seen at Lincoln Center in New York, the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, the Schema Art Museum in South Korea and at biennales in China and South Korea.
The practice
“I view the human body as a living archive of collective memory.”
© Satadru Sovan Banduri
Flowers, birds and butterflies fill each of the nine sheets. His subjects are the fragile life of the planet, the politics of the body and what he calls “planet-wide grief.” He uses “code, pigment and live action.”
A grieving planet
© Satadru Sovan Banduri
He does not treat the damage to nature as a matter of figures. He describes his work as “framing environmental collapse as a profound spiritual rupture.” In his paintings, birds, animals and creatures of the sea share the canvas with the human body. “I construct surreal landscapes that map human presence against non-human survival.”
A festival turns ten
Much of his time goes into building places for other artists. He founded HDBOX and the International Behavioural Art Festival. This year the festival turns ten. He is organising it with 35 artists from India and abroad.
He is also making new light installations and paintings, preparing work for the Lahore Biennale and writing a lecture on South Asian performance art for Shanghai and Macao.
He sits on the board of the Lock Unlock Performance Art Project and works with the Artistic Research Working Group of Performance Studies International.
“Art schools teach us technique, but they don’t always teach us how to survive the silence that follows graduation.”
To young artists, from the panel
“You are like stars flickering in a vast night sky, or fireflies tracing subtle paths through the moonlight. The night is deep, and the studio can be a lonely place. But when you send your work to a publication, you are putting your light into motion.”
“Never stop sending your work into the dark.”
Prof. Satadru Sovan Banduri
Instagram @satadrusovan
Read Issue Four, with all eighteen films →
More about Satadru →
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