Sarban Chowdhury (b. 1992) is a ceramist, designer, and educator based in Jodhpur, India. He completed his BFA & MFA from the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata. In recent years, he has been invited to symposiums, exhibitions, and residency programs in India and abroad, including the Taoxichuan Ceramic Art Avenue in Jingdezhen, China, or the Centrum Ceramiki in Boleslawiec, Poland. Sarban was named one of the top ten emerging Indian artists hosted by MASH India and supported by KHOJ in 2022. His work has received awards such as the National Scholarship by the Ministry of Culture, the Prince Claus Fund grant, the Lalit Kala Akademi travel grant, the Prafulla Dahanukar Award, and the Artdemic by Gujral Foundation. He currently works as an Assistant Professor in the Fashion and Lifestyle Accessories department at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Jodhpur, India.
Sarban Chowdhury’s practice of working with clay is an everyday learning process for coping with minor and major failures in life. Ceramics as a medium teaches him to gaze at life from a different standpoint. From environmental awareness to the exploration of the human mind and privacy concerns, everything he observes and experiences around him somehow seeps into his subconscious mind and eventually reflects in his work.
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Featured work
Selected works, 2022-2023
Sarban Chowdhury’s practice of working with clay is an everyday learning process for coping with minor and major failures in life. Ceramics as a medium teaches him to gaze at life from a different standpoint. “Failures in ceramics are inevitable,” be it early in making, drying, or glazing and firing. He feels that every time he opens the kiln, it’s filled with thrill, hope, excitement, as well as disappointment at times. The material has the final say over who he is as an artist. It can be both humbling and humiliating.
Everything he observes and experiences around him somehow seeps into his subconscious mind and eventually reflects in his work. His work titled “Untuned sound of leaves falling from the ignorant sky” is titled as a metaphor for the dead birds falling from the ignorant sky during a catastrophe back in November 2019 when thousands of migratory birds died mysteriously in Rajasthan’s Sambhar Lake, the country’s largest inland saltwater lake near Jaipur sending shockwaves among locals and authorities. The work was intended to create a visual awareness of human greed as one of the major factors resulting in the contamination of the ecosystem, which silently disturbs our natural flora and fauna.
He prefers to introspect, explore and analyze his own self, which gives him an understanding of the human mind- its emotions, desires, and complications. His other work, “An indistinct memory & its traces” portrays intensified emotions filled with desires, fear, imagination, and complications in the artist’s mind. Each visual imitates an experience that the artist had around that time, reflecting upon nuances and introspections from daily life in a visual diary format. The visuals identify different episodes of nightmares, fantasies, delusions, and contemplations. The work “A well full of shadows” was inspired by the idea of privacy invasion and identity theft. In today’s world, our fingerprints play a vital role in determining who we are. We are in an era of technological advancement with access to all our personal information, including dermatoglyphics. Is that data safe ? Is anyone misusing this data? Can we trust technology completely? The work portrays this fear and anxiety that the artist has been experiencing lately. The idea of using gold was a metaphor to symbolize that our biometrics can be a valuable possession for data intruders.
He is constantly searching for a fresh perspective and prefers an unconventional approach to the medium. He endeavors to create a visual imbued with inherent enigma and evokes viewer’s interaction, a visual begging to be explored and examined in much the same way a child investigates the world with wonder, curiosity, and trepidation. His work “Cultivating chaos” was created with the intention of giving the viewer a tumultuous feeling looking at a composition of outlandish and absurd objects formulated together in an unfamiliar fashion to symbolize the complicated human mind. As an artist, he must arouse a sense of unease and encourage viewers to carefully consider what they see—what is compelling them.
