Anshul Roy G’24 of the College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGGRAPH’s Art Gallery Best in Show award for his M.F.A. thesis project, “Rage Against the Archive,” at a conference in late July.
Showcasing the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques, the SIGGRAPH conference’s art gallery theme, “Beyond Words: Transcending Language,” spoke to Roy’s artivist project, which explores contemporary photographs as a form of markup language.
Consisting of video, performance, and new media art, the project investigates how the New York Public Library’s website catalogs, displays, and sells ethnographic photos from “The People of India.”
“This project scrutinizes whether institutional archives inadvertently perpetuate colonial exploitation and the camera’s violence, raising important questions about how we as a more conscientious society should consume images of historical atrocities,” says Roy.
When starting out in the M.F.A. art photography program in VPA’s Department of Film and Media Arts, Roy carried an idealistic view of photography, working on projects related to street photography, photomicrography, and architecture photography. His view changed when he discovered how the medium has been historically used.
“My artistic practice had a paradigm shift ever since I discovered the nefarious aspects of the medium that I loved so much and realized how the camera has historically been employed as a weapon to subjugate certain groups of people,” Roy says.
Rooted in postcolonial discourses, his current artistic practice investigates issues like identity, historical memory, cultural representation, and visual ethics. His work specifically dives into photography’s role in “othering” during the British Raj and how these images appear in museums and archives.
The Best in Show award has motivated Roy to continue seeking innovations and new prospects for his work.
“It is an immense honor to win the ACM SIGGRAPH Best in Show award, and I am still in disbelief,” he says. “Meeting many talented New Media artists who are pushing the boundaries of contemporary art was an incredible experience.”