Pinak Banik is a researcher, artist, and educator whose work explores the intersections of artistic labor, postcolonial theory, visual culture, and social justice. As a researcher Pinak’s scholarly work engages with the complex relationships between the conditions of social stratification and their sustenance with the formation of aesthetic-literary technologies of modern art in South Asia. He is interested in understanding the role of the institution of modern art in defining the histories and social realities of people, and the social, ethical, and political formation of the citizenry of modernizing nation-states and the moments of resistance dismantling its schematics.
His academic pursuits are complemented by his engagement with museum studies, subaltern studies, and digital humanities. Pinak’s artistic practice is multidisciplinary, encompassing sculpture, installations, performance art, and critical research, which shares the spirit of decolonization methodologies and emancipatory movements, such as of subaltern counterpublics, challenging the hegemonic presets of power through artistic work in text-image-speech-movement-performance. Pinak sees his artistic work deeply entangled with academic practice. Pinak is a member of the Panjeri Artists’ Union.
Panjeri Artists’ Union is a community of 14 practitioners from diverse fields including visual art, design, literature, film, photography, and music. Formed on 21st February 2022—International Mother Language Day—the union draws its name from Panjeri, the traditional navigational tool used by the boatmen to sail across riverine Bengal’s water-routes and maritime pathways. Echoing this metaphor, the collective seeks to be a navigational force amid the obscured terrains of history, in the liminality of turbulent identities and profound epistemic confusion, amidst the unfathomable inconspicuousness of the dominant ideology.
Rooted in the lived experiences of communities shaped by the long partition of the Indian subcontinent, bearing the trauma of war, famine, and enforced displacement—the union works at the intersection of art, memory, and political resistance. Their practice is deeply collaborative and community-embedded, using material traces, performance, and pedagogy to challenge hegemonic narratives and explore alternative ways of knowing and being. Panjeri Artists’ Union builds a critical platform for dialogue, dissent, and pedagogic intervention, particularly within public and community spaces. Beyond exhibitions, the union facilitate workshops, conversations and publications. Their publishing practice is an integral part of their work, producing zines, conceptual texts, visual essays, and archival explorations reflecting on resistance, memory and place-making.