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OPEN CALL
01 – 30, MAY 2026

Debsuddha Banerjee

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN

India

Belonging

The personal project ‘Belonging’ which has initiated 2020, seeks to address the mental health condition, sisterly companionship, and resilience of my elderly unmarried aunts, Swati Goswami and Gayatri Goswami, who already spent socially isolated lives due to the racial discrimination they have faced being born albino, and they have been further isolated from their surroundings by enforced government measures against the COVID-19 pandemic. Their entire life has been in social isolation, so Swati and Gayatri know well what isolation actually means but the experience of the pandemic has exponentially affected the sisters. The imposed isolation made their already finite world made even smaller. My starting point for this work is my interest in my aunts’ life whose struggles I have witnessed since my childhood. I saw how they were awkward in life; unable to move about freely, or talk freely outside their home, the safest place. A daunting scrutiny, taunts has always been embarrassed them. This, along with personal memories of racial discrimination have shattered them psychologically and forced them into social isolation. I am collaborating with my aunts in this project to observe the impacts of isolation on their mental health and their companionship since the pandemic took place. How Swati and Gayatri have been continuing their sisterly companionship in the form of resilience, how the pandemic has challenged them psychologically, and how they sustain themselves through dreams, desire, and sisterhood, at this elderly age, in their one sixty-three years old residence in Kolkata, India, the place where they born and raised. This body of work aims to commemorate their resilience through their sisterhood.

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