Sukanya Ghosh
Five Million Incidents

About the Actant

Sukanya's practice is located within painting, photography, animation and the moving image. She works with the minutiae of urban life, popular culture and memory. Sukanya studied Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda, and Animation at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. She has been awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Award, Sarai Independent Fellowship; artist commissions from French Embassy in India, Royal Commonwealth Society, UK and Motiroti, UK, among others. She has also been Artist-in-Residence at Khoj, New Delhi; Spike Island, Bristol; and AIR Vallauris, France. Her work has been shown most recently at the Lianzhou Museum of Photography, China and Jimei x Arles Festival 2019, China. Other shows include: Ephemeral, Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa 2018; Mutations, 2018 New Delhi; Fòcas India: Document (India, Scotland); GoaPhoto 2017; The Surface of Things, 2016, New Delhi and 2017, Mumbai and Tales & Fables 2015, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Yokohama. She managed Arts programmes and design at the Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre, Calcutta for several years. She has done various graphic design projects including film publicity, book, exhibition and theatre design.

A Man, Some Trees, And A Dog
This project moves along a trajectory of drawn images creating fragmentary glimpses of movement. Sequential drawings transform the walls of the buildings of the Goethe-Instiut / Max Mueller Bhavans in Delhi and Kolkata. Animated apparitions of a man, some trees and dog, appear, disappear and re-appear in various quick gestures. The artist draws, erases and re-draws – the man walks, the dog runs the trees rustle. Over the course of two days, Sukanya uses walls, stairs and exposed surfaces of the building to draw and animate. There is no narrative script – just a dynamic animation that evokes a sense of movement and distance at the same time. The ever evolving drawn figures/landscapes, rendering strange the pristine walls around the institute and blurring the boundaries of drawing, video and performance. The project attempts to bring out the usually solitary working processes of animation film making into the glare of public consideration, albeit temporarily. The audience is then forced to confront the parts and the whole, the static and the moving image.