Join us for on Thursday, 8 October 2026, at 6 pm, for the next 10×10 Salon with Poulomi Basu, organized in collaboration with Magnum Foundation. Poulomi Basu will talk about her new publications Ecdysis and Always Coming Home.
Please RSVP here to attend this salon.
Poulomi Basu is a neuroexpansive artist known for her exploration of the interrelationship between systems of power and bodies through work that exists at the limits of photography/art, film, creative technologies and activism. Basu’s work is defined by her transnational identity, working across hybrid, interdisciplinary and experimental mediums. Whilst the centre of her wohttps://www.poulomibasu.com/rks is often women of the Global South (non Euro-centric), like herself, her art and its histories are connected beyond their places of origin.
Basu is a BAFTA Breakthrough UK 2024 awardee, was nominated in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, and received the ICP Infinity Award in 2023. Her book Centralia (2020) won the Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award Jury Prize and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. In 2020, she received the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal for Blood Speaks, a transmedia project that contributed to major policy change. Her work is held in leading international museum and institutional collections.
Ecdysis confronts the shame and silence surrounding women’s blood politics across cultures and continents — alongside the mystical moments that mark a girl’s coming of age. The book traces wounds carried across generations — the silence, the suppression, the bodies made sites of struggle — and the strength that emerges when that silence is broken. A major new essay by Basu draws lines between her own family history, the women she has worked with, and the systems of patriarchy, caste, race and colonialism that shape women’s lives.
Emerging from the characters featured in Busa’s Always Coming Home, a film and installation first exhibited at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, this book expands the project’s exploration of transnational identity, displacement, and belonging. Drawing on archival materials, research gathered during the creation of the work, and synthesized data, the book presents a series of imagined conversations between its characters. These dialogues move beyond the boundaries of the original installation, creating a speculative space where voices can meet across time, distance, and experience. Part research, part fiction, and part artistic experiment, this volume invites to engage with questions of memory, migration, and the enduring impact of displacement through a unique form of storytelling.
This Salon is hosted at Magnum Foundation:
Magnum Foundation expands creativity and diversity in visual storytelling, activating new audiences and ideas through the innovative use of images. Through grants, mentorship, and creative collaborations, we partner with socially engaged imagemakers exploring new models for storytelling. Since our founding in 2007 by members of the Magnum Photos cooperative, we have made more than 600 direct grants to visual storytellers from over 80 countries. To find out about upcoming exhibitions and events, learn about grant opportunities, or join our community of support, please visit magnumfoundation.org.