Poulomi Basu: Centralia

March 3 - May 13, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, March 3, 6-8pm
Assembly, 4411 Montrose Blvd., Suite F

The Truth upholds the fragrant Earth and makes the living water wet. 
Truth makes fire burn and the air move, makes the sun shine and all life grow. 
A hidden truth supports everything. 
Find it and win.  

— Ramayana

Poulomi Basu’s award-winning series Centralia (2010-2020) draws us in with lyrical images of mysterious landscapes and figures. We are quickly denied, however, the access and understanding that we often expect from photography—especially photography that seems to use the language of the documentary. This is Basu’s intention, as she crafts a narrative of “docu-fiction,” transforming the story of a decades-long and virtually unknown guerrilla war in Central India into an ambiguous narrative that unsettles our understanding of truth, media, violence, feminism, and environmentalism. 

Basu layers multiple conflicts, landscapes, and actors within this body of work in order to dislocate the images from any real place or time. Centralia captures the struggle between forest-dwelling indigenous populations in the Indian states of Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and West Bengal, where the coveted mineral deposits of iron ore, bauxite, and coal are mined and exploited by outside forces, including the Indian government. The displaced tribal population has responded and rebelled since the 1960s by organizing as Maoist revolutionaries called Naxalites. 

The series takes its title, however, from a now-abandoned former mining town in Pennsylvania that was forcibly evacuated in the early 1990s, after a subterranean fire released toxic gasses and created sinkholes over the course of several decades. For Basu, Centralia’s story speaks to—and perhaps prefigures—the destructive toll of resource extraction on the land and its inhabitants in India and other areas of the global south. 

Basu counters assumptions of warfare by infusing color, femininity, and ambivalence into this contested landscape: “The conflict, with its many actors all occupying opaque roles, has created a space with its own internal logic and landscape.” Far from cohesive or resolved, Centralia asks us to wander between places and times—both pictured and not pictured—in order to draw our own conclusions about photography and knowledge, right and wrong, reality and fiction. 

Poulomi Basu (Indian, b. 1983) is a neurodiverse artist known for her exploration of the interrelationship between systems of power and bodies through work that exists at the limits of art, technology, and activism. She has become widely known for her influential works Blood Speaks, Centralia, To Conquer Her Land, and Fireflies, to name a few. Her focus on the intersectionality of ecological, racial, cultural, and political issues experienced specifically by womxn of the global south—such as herself—gives agency to those whose voices are deliberately silenced. She has ferociously advocated for womxn through her practice as an artist and activist for more than a decade. Shifting between mediums, Basu has to date worked with photography, performance, installation, virtual reality, and film influenced by magical realism, sci-fi, and speculative fiction.

Basu was awarded the 2023 ICP Infinity Award for outstanding contribution to Contemporary Photography and New Media. Her first photobook, Centralia, was published by Dewi Lewis in 2020. The book and exhibition won the 2020 Rencontres d'Arles Discovery Award Jury Prize, and was shortlisted for the prestigious 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, among many others. She was invited to SXSW 2019 and the 78th La Biennale Cinema Venezia “Production Bridge.” Basu was awarded the prestigious Hood Medal by the Royal Photographic Society for her transmedia work Blood Speaks, which put menstrual rights on the international agenda and resulted in a major policy change. 

Basu was selected for Sundance New Frontiers Fellowship, and she is a National Geographic Explorer and Magnum Foundation Social Justice Fellow. Her works are part of public collections, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), Autograph, London (UK), the Museum of Modern Art (Special Collections Library), the Martin Parr Foundation (UK), and Rencontres d’Arles (FR).