Avijit Halder

Higher Pictures is pleased to present the work of Avijit Halder. This is Halder's first gallery exhibition.

Through photography, painting, installation, and video, Halder explores his past and present identity as an artist, articulating his experiences of loss, longing, displacement, and transformation.

In one self-portrait an image of the artist and his cat is completed by their reflection in a mirror, the entire scene bathed in icy blue light; in another, entitled Birth, Halder stands amidst a flurry of brightly colored sarees that swirl and dance around him. Halder's paintings on canvas and cardboard derive from photographs he distorts and reconstructs in an attempt to understand himself as a visual subject.

In 360 Months, four channels of video are projected onto and through hanging sarees that belonged to Halder's mother. The first video shows the artist lighting a portable kerosene stove, the fire violently roaring to life-a cherished and visceral memory of his late mother cooking at home; in the second video Halder's friend lovingly swaddles him in his mother's sarees; the third presents a cropped clip from the documentary Born Into Brothels in which the filmmaker and an NGO worker discuss their narrative of Halder's mother's death; and in the fourth video Halder appears and disappears, pulling a trail of brilliant fabric back and forth across a rooftop in a perpetual, dizzying line of color.

Avijit Halder (b. 1988, Kolkata, India) is a 2019 graduate of the ICP-Bard MFA program and earned his BA in film from New York University in 2012. Halder lives and works in New York City.