Homed

Purnaa Deb, Homed, Drypoint Intaglio and Chine Collé, 30 x 23cm, Ed 1 of 1, 2025, Framed 

Through my art, I tried to investigate identity through the dialectics of the Self and Society. I strive to explore the interface between social, political, and personal. I try to elucidate the way simple material pieces from human existence shape their identity. My works are cross-pollination between these banal elements of my personal sphere and the references subtracted from larger peripheries and discourses on tradition, politics of identity, socio-political complexities, and nostalgia in a larger context.

Nevertheless the complex history of the land of Freestate, the fragile similarity of ‘Hinsudthan’ and ‘Bantusthan’ inspire to see the vast landscape of this area with more inquisitiveness. My continuous search for the home I left in Kolkata, India found the common ground with the feeling when I see and try to learn more about the land here.

I fabricate edifices around banality with images, words, lines, and colours enthused by events, incidents, and discourses taking place in the larger context of society. The experience of growing up in a middle-class household in South Asia (with both of my parents being ardent political activists) was fundamental to my class consciousness and it helped me gain an insight into the mechanisms of the late capitalist paradigm and how the concept of ‘Society’ works in general. I indicate my assessments of certainty by using the concept of place, often a literal, physical space. Depending on the place I depict, it becomes a metaphor for comfort, tension, belonging, uneasiness. The emotions that memories evoke often transpire in my works in the form of abstract vignettes with painstakingly intricate details, lines, and native languages I come across in my daily routine, seamlessly drifting between the contrasting realities of Kolkata and Johannesburg.