Chandan Gomes
Another Life, Another Time, Another Death
Chandan Gomes has studied Philosophy at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi (2009). Emotional and intellectual anxieties drive him as an artist. He has won numerous awards and fellowships and has been exhibited widely – Les Recontresd’Arles, France (2018, supported by PHOTOINK), Kochi Muziris Biennale (2018-19), Foto Fest Biennale, Houston (2018), Serendipity Arts Festival (2018), Asia House, London (2018), Zeytiburnu International Photography Festival, Istanbul (2018) and Benaki Museum, Athens (2016), amongst other places. His most recent exhibitions were held at MMAG Foundation, Amman (2020), Landskrona Museum (2019), and Rubenstein Arts Centre (2019). He was also the artist in residence at Centre for Documentary Studies, Duke University (2019). Chandan teaches at the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communications, Delhi and Ashoka University, Haryana. He is currently working on his first film and dreams of opening a stationery shop one day.
Another Life, Another Time, Another Death
Hand-made artist book by Chandan Gomes
In this world
We walk on the roof of hell Gazing at flowers
– Kobayashi Issa
The photographs that emerge as a response to the above haiku are not part of any specific project, but life itself – my practice originates in the tradition of documentary photography and is best represented by the handmade or the artist book.
I left home in 2012; I spent the next eight years chronicling lives and stories. It is in this period I started making handmade books. The apparatus was simple; it could be easily carried around in a backpack and was very cost effective. But most importantly, I found solace in these books. Being an introvert since childhood, I could express myself with greater ease in their pages. Another life, another time, another death is a photo-novella where all these different books come together, to question their own identity. Autobiographical in nature, this ongoing book is a deliberation on memory, distance, violence and intimacy.