BIOGRAPHY
Sarnath Banerjee was born in Calcutá, India 1972. Lives in New Delhi
2006 Fondazione Sandretto de Rebaudengo, Turim; IFA Gallery Stuttgart, Germany
2005 IFA Gallery Berlin
2003 Comica, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Response/ ability, Oxo Tower, Barge House, London
Graphic Novels Corridor, India & United Kingdom, Penguin, 2005;
Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, India & United Kingdom, Penguin, 2007.
INTERVIEW
Giancarlo Hannud: Your project for the 28th Bienal de São Paulo seems to move away from your earlier work, imbedded as it was in the graphic novel tradition. How do you see this project in relation to your previous practice?
Sarnath Banerjee: I have hit upon the language of comics after many trials and error and come to believe that it is possibly the best way to communicate ideas, narrate incidents, and give a sense of time, place and atmosphere. Furthermore it is most amenable to addressing the complex nature of stories that are emerging in our society.
However, I found myself questioning the ways in which contemporary comics is practiced. Except for rare experiments done by brilliant graphic novelists, most comics creators function within fixed traditions, which occasionally makes people think of comics more as a genre than a form.
After writing two works of fiction, I was getting a bit fed up with my authorial voice. Also, in recent years, I read a slew of contemporary literary novels that were flatulent and self-indulgent. Increasingly, in the world that I come from, facts, if arranged well and treated with irony and whimsy, can give rise to more pertinent narratives than those built by design. My training as a documentary filmmaker helped me perfect the process of fact gathering, which in itself is very rewarding. All these add up.
Giancarlo Hannud: It is clear that in drawing one can emphasize, or exclude, certain aspects of reality, thereby distilling it into whatever it is one wishes to achieve. How do you see the exercise of an uninvolved and objective journalism when working with such an essentially subjective medium?
Sarnath Banerjee: I think people make a bigger deal of objective journalism than it really is. Unseen personal and political biases of the reporter are omnipresent in every report. Editing, for example, can completely change the emphasis of a story. The quest for singular truth is more in the realm of religious fundamentalism than journalism. Journalism at its best should complicate the truth.
Using graphic reportage, a semblance of truth that is deeply embedded in vast chunks of information can be revealed by economy of words and judicious imagery. Deceptively, the illustrations give the narrative a subjective quality. This covertness may lead to surprising results.
Giancarlo Hannud: One could say that the vocabulary utilized by comics and graphic novels requires an extremely sophisticated involvement on the part of the reader for the work to actually take place. In order to create a satisfying level of meaning he / she not only has to deal with image, text and layout, but must fuse these three elements together in order to create an intelligible whole. How do you believe this joint reader / author effort influences the subversive qualities of comics?
Sarnath Banerjee: Comics is very participatory, like a tango between the writer and the reader, almost like reading a map, the reader has to make sense of it. Beyond each panel or page there is a phantom narrative, all that makes it complex yet not complicated. I think subversion comes from not just the comics narrative but the multiple levels at which the story operates. In the best cases the images don’t illustrate the text, but maintain a logic of their own and when put together create meanings that neither text nor image can achieve by themselves.
Giancarlo Hannud is an art historian and acted as a curatorial assistant at the 28TH Bienal de São Paulo. He lives in
São Paulo.
Projects with updated content