Poulomi Basu: Always Coming Home

1 Oct 2025-3 Jan 2026

From the series 'Always coming Home'. Courtesy the artist

Overview

Focal Point Gallery presents Always Coming Home, an immersive multi-room installation of new work by Indian transmedia artist and activist Poulomi Basu (b.1983, Calcutta). The exhibition combines moving image, photography, sculpture, sound and performance to create an interactive space where different realities and speculative futures simultaneously exist, exploring the notion of exile as a shared human experience.

Basu’s diverse practice borrows from South Asian Futurism, speculative and science fiction to focus on the relationship between systems of power and bodies, particularly brown bodies. For this new installation Basu uses her own experience as an immigrant in the UK as a vehicle to investigate the complexity of transnational identity and the extended trauma of having to leave home due to violence.

The exhibition will feature a series of new photographic and film works created by interweaving the artist’s personal archive with found photographs, letters and videos. A new multichannel moving image work will play across a large semi-spherical screen in Gallery 1 and across screens dispersed within sculptural installations in Gallery 2. The films create a dynamic interplay between notions of presence and absence, using perspectives on the margins to demonstrate how subtle and everyday violence has been normalised within society. The films explore themes of absurdity, existentialism and alienation from society and oneself, mapping internal and external landscapes on the journey towards liberation.

Interactive found objects, lights, and sound work will also fill the gallery spaces, creating a multi-sensory experience. Through layering lived experiences, both personal and gathered, with invented dreamscapes, Basu explores displacement, identity, and resistance, provoking critical reflection on the socio-political tensions shaping contemporary culture.

Archives of the past define the present and continue to have prolonged political power. Interrogating archives is essential, but who interrogates the archives of the dispossessed and the deliberately silenced? Basu asks the audience to understand how one’s perceptions of place, body and belonging can be disrupted. Always Coming Home re-imagines these archives and creates them anew as a radical act of world building and resilience in which those who continue to be rendered invisible can reclaim their narrative.

About The Artist

Poulomi Basu is a neurodiverse artist known for her exploration of the interrelationship between systems of power and bodies through work that exists at the limits of art, creative technologies and activism. Basu’s work is defined by her transnational identity, working across interdisciplinary and experimental media. Whilst the centre of her works are often women of the Global South, like herself, her art and its histories are connected beyond their places of origin. Her works encourage us all to challenge and revise dominant histories by highlighting the global exchanges and flow of experiences and ideas.

Basu is a BAFTA Breakthrough UK 2024 recipient and was awarded 2023 ICP Museum Infinity Award for outstanding contribution to ‘Contemporary Photography and New Media’. Her work was nominated in competition at Festival de Cannes 2024. Her first photobook ‘Centralia’ was published in 2020 and the book and exhibition won the 2020 Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award Jury Prize, and was shortlisted for the prestigious 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize among many others. In 2020, 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. Basu is a National Geographic Explorer, Magnum Foundation Social Justice Fellow. Her work is held in the collections of Victoria & Albert Museum (UK), Museum of Modern Art Library – Special Collections (USA), Harvard Art Museums (USA), Autograph ABP (UK), Martin Parr Foundation (UK), Rencontres d’Arles (France), Olympic Museum (Switzerland), Lightwork (USA).