Philippe Calia (Profile)
Philippe Calia (b. 1985, Paris)
About his work
Philippe Calia is an artist, photographer and filmmaker, based in Bangalore, India. Since 2013, Calia has been collaborating with PIX as a photo editor and researcher. In 2015 he co-founded BIND, a platform for photography in India with a public photobook library.
Artist Statement: “My works are set within a protean documentary practice, privileging rather long temporalities and mixing primarily photography, video and text. Interweaving themes of memory, time and history, my processes involve vernacular and residual documents - in the sense of a debris found at the edge of the archive - and integrate them into my own production via collage and montage techniques. Questions of preservation, perception and commemoration are central to my approach.
Through this practice, the act of representation often becomes a reflexive one: considered through its absence or negation, it focuses on spaces in which the image is threatened with disappearance, sometimes simply prohibited or destroyed. This way I attempt to grapple with a few lines of rupture structuring human society: in particular those between sacred and profane, art and the ordinary, or memory and oblivion.
I nurture a particular affection for the still image, one which humbly invites us to look at our environment once again, and thereby, has the ability to make the otherwise obvious vacillate. Artefact of the intimate as much as political instrument, ally of deconstruction as well as of ideologies, I believe in the power of the photographic medium to interrogate our surroundings as much as to acknowledge the involuntary poetry of the everyday.”
Education
- M.A (Photographic Studies); University of Westminster, London; 2009-10
- Research Master in Comparative Politics; Institute of Political Studies (Sciences-Po), Paris; 2007-09
- PG. Diploma in Journalism; Jamia University, New Delhi; 2006-07
- B.A Level equivalent in Political Sciences; Institute of Political Studies (Sciences-Po), Paris; 2004-06
Solo Exhibitions
- Études (La Nuit); 24 Jor Bagh, New Delhi; 2015
Selected Group Exhibitions / Festivals
- Indian Contemporary Photography 1; UP Gallery; Hsinchu City, Taïwan; 2021 / upcoming
- Collaborative: A Myth of Two Souls by Vasantha Yogananthan; Chanel Nexus Hall, Tokyo; and Musée de L'Elysée, Lausanne; 2019
- Indian Cities in Photography; ENSA Paris-Malaquais, Paris; 2018
- I Get By; Diesel Gallery, Mumbai; 2012
- Light Sensitive; P3 Gallery, London; 2010
- Singapore International Photography Festival; 2020
- Influences Indiennes; Beaucouzé, France; 2018
- Focus Festival; Kala Ghoda, Mumbai; 2017
- Delhi Photo Festival; 2013
- A Summer In Shahpurjat; Printer's Devil; New Delhi; 2013
- Belfast Photography Festival; 2012
- Film by Photographers; Photomonth East London; The Rich Mix, London; 2012
- Locating the Sacred; SLPS Judson Memorial Church; New York; 2012
- Photo-Open; The Rich Mix; London; 2011
Scholarships & Residencies
- Laureate: Writing and Emerging Forms Grant; Civil Society of Multimedia's Authors; Paris; 2020
- Laureate: Visual Arts Commission; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; 2019
- WAA Artist Residency; Bombay; 2016
Other Achievements
- Curatorial and Editorial Projects: BIND (2015-2020) : Co-Founder, Program & Library manager; PIX (since 2013) : Photo Editor & Researcher
- Widely published in several art publications; Selected publications: Art India, Courrier International, Der Spiegel, Le Monde M, Revue Z, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Indian Quarterly
- Honorable Mention; Dorothea Lange - Paul Taylor Prize; 2020