Centralia

Assembly presents "Centralia" by Poulomi Basu, an award-winning series of photographs that exposes hidden crimes of war as an indigenous people fight for their survival. In war, truth is the first casualty; this work explores the unsteady relationship between reality and fiction and how our perceptions of truth are manipulated. "Centralia" has been called a hallucinatory reflection where an invisible conflict between a guerilla army, an indigenous people and the Indian state reveals wider issues of environmental degradation. Such exploitation comes at a price: the transmogrification of violence into the de-facto language of politics.

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Poulomi Basu is an Indian transmedia artist, photographer, and activist whose work advocating for the rights of women has received wide attention. In her practice, she explores how the formation of identity intersects with geopolitics to reveal the deep, often hidden power structures in our societies. Basu was awarded the prestigious Hood Medal by the Royal Photographic Society for her transmedia work Blood Speaks which put menstrual rights on the international agenda and resulted in a major policy change. She has exhibited internationally and is a National Geographic Society Explorer, Sundance Fellow, and a Magnum Foundation Fellow. She directs Just Another Photo Festival, a traveling guerilla visual media festival that democratizes photography by offering it to ordinary people and building new audiences. Her first book, Centralia (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2020), was the winner of the Discovery Award 2020 at Les Rencontres d'Arles and a nominee for the 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.