In August, I spoke to Edinburgh-based artist Debjani Banerjee about her exhibition, Jalsaghar, which I saw at Bluecoat gallery in Liverpool. Celebrating the artist’s Bengali-British heritage, Jalsaghar was a magical, dream-like experience that combined questions of identity and family with humour, as seen in a Henry Hoover-inspired sculpture. I was incredibly happy to be speaking to such an interesting artist.
Debi describes Jalsaghar as a product of things she’s been thinking about for a long time. Growing up in a Bengali family in England, she talks about their tradition of the post-meal music room: “After the food, the harmonium would come out, and everyone would sit in the living room and sing.” Debjani (Debi, for short) portrayed this in her exhibition with a music room in the very gallery. Her sister’s voice, singing a devotional song to invoke the mother goddess Kali, provides the soundtrack for Debi’s short film.
In Bengali, ‘Jalsaghar’ means music room and is the name of a film by Satyajit Ray, an important inspiration for Debi. In fact, the exhibition poster is based another film’s poster by Ray called Devi (1960). This film tells the story of a young woman who is believed to be the incarnation of a goddess. It is perhaps curious that this name, Devi (meaning goddess), is so similar to Debi’s own name. However, in the Jalsaghar exhibition poster, it is Debi herself who appears in the image. She says that making the poster was the start of her thinking about showing herself and her heritage in her art, after spending her childhood trying to fit in. Interestingly, Debi started working on Jalsaghar over lockdown in 2020, and she notes that the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement helped her realise that it was not only permitted, but actually a good thing, to show herself in her art. She said: “It was valid, I felt like I did have a voice.”
Debi finished her fine art degree in 2005, but feels that she couldn’t have made the kind of work that’s in Jalsaghar when she was a student: “I almost needed to live a bit of life first,” she said. Her artist’s residency acted as a catalyst for making her art, as she was able to fully devote her time to it and spend her mornings writing. During her residency, she was greatly inspired her dreams — something which was beautifully apparent in Jalsaghar — and Debi is fascinated by how we can discover things in our dreams. Notably, she said that she feels like “we’re all discovering.”
Collaboration has been a huge part of Debi’s life as an artist and in the creation of Jalsaghar. ‘Mahabharata’ (2024) is a large tapestry that was created in a workshop in Glasgow that Debi led. She appreciates learning skills shared by other people, but says it was really about the conversations she got to have with people while making it. I’m a big fan of doing art with friends, and Debi describes excellently how a friendship is already special, but it becomes something else entirely when you work to create something together. I suspect these relationships are part of the reason why Jalsaghar felt so magical.
We also touched on the challenges of life as an artist. Debi points out how having to work a different job while being an artist means you inevitably take much longer to finish a piece of work. We also discussed the problem of how to exhibit work. The artist commented that she’s still figuring this out as she feels like she’s relatively new to the scene. She mentioned how her and her partner have used their apartment as a kind of pop-up gallery in the past, which was hugely successful, perhaps because big galleries are intimidating, and alternative spaces feel more authentic.
I asked Debi for her top picks in Scottish art venues. She mentioned Dundee College of Art, and Tramway in Glasgow— of particular interest to Debi because of her work in performance art. She recommends the Embassy in Edinburgh, noting that they work with artists at all different stages. I hope that amidst the current climate of arts being underfunded, and the University of Edinburgh cutting arts courses in the ECA, art fans will continue to support and hopefully set up more wonderful venues like these.
Debjani Banerjee’s final piece of advice to young artists is this: ‘Keep going, talk to your friends, make projects happen, find a community of people that you like working with.’
Photo by Gavin Allanwood on Unsplash
