Abhishek Basu
Labyrinth
The mind is quite a labyrinth, much like the night—a journey into the depths of which these images attempt to dig deep into. When suddenly faced with a vast, dark and intrinsically violent world along with the godforsaken challenge of trying to find one’s place in it, questions of identity followed by its variety of whys, whos, and whats parallel in the night. A lost, curious, and most importantly, fearful mind, juxtaposes itself with the ways of the night; its shrieking silences, its blurring madness, its anxious scare, its haunting concealing and sometimes the most hair-raising of it all—its reverberatingly conscious, stillness.
Meaning is sought to be found by questioning order, stability, organization, and singularity through a clever play of light and dark, shadows and silhouettes, nature and culture. The images ache to etch the journey of a self, which is ripping itself apart with every click—in the raw, on the streets, via a certain quest through haphazardness, over and above the ‘senses’, under and into the construction of reality.
Turning Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ right over its head, the images reiterate why one ‘un-thinks and therefore is’. Focusing on the instinctual, the pleasurable, the nonsensical, the entire process of funding meaning, is questioned. By running in circles in search of and away from, identity and the very root of the self is created by a spiraling sense of sinking found at the bottom of it all.
I believe that the substance of the labyrinth project is to form the ‘I’ whose processes of formation are these images themselves. It is the loop that entraps, engulfs and somehow in the process of it all, itself becomes the loop.
Text by Joyona Medhi
Bio
Abhishek was born in 1990 in Tatanagar, Jharkhand, India . It all started with the mere idea of discovering stories. As a young boy, Abhishek became interested in photography after assisting his older brother in the television industry in Mumbai. He began his studies in communications, but after discovering an attraction to photo books, he chose to study documentary photography in New Delhi. Abhishek photographs people and environments that are directly relatable to where life has taken him. He uses the medium within a wide range of reasons such as comprehending his own anxieties, to bridging social barriers. This is the main topic of discussion in his ongoing and work-in-progress book, Ellipsis. In 2017, he received a scholarship from Burn Magazine to attend a workshop in Puerto Rico with Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey. Abhishek is as a freelance photographer, and he works for various publishing houses on experimental story telling techniques, book design, curation and multimedia. Taking to Abbas’s advice, “buy a pair of shoes and fall in love with it”. Abhishek’s subjects span the wide variety of where life and his understanding of it has taken him. Through seeing macro concepts out of his anxiety, to even using the medium to bridge social barriers in his ongoing work ellipsis.… One can say that the photographer in him attempts to make the most out of the power of his lens every day.
Abhishek currently lives in New Delhi, India.
Wonderfully bonkers.