Nilanjan Das completed his BFA and MFA in Printmaking from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. He is a trustee and artist of the Hamdasti Artist Collective, Kolkata.

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Nilanjan is a printmaker and installation artist based in Kolkata. His research explores the critical interconnection between public and private space in relation to intimacy, gender roles, and social relationships and how it negotiates power dynamics. Therefore, I often examine public spaces across geographic locations and the various components they are composed of, such as social or legal rules, value systems, norms, functionalities, physical structure, and even the history of a place. Values, norms, or rules are, according to Henry Lefebvre, a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, one of the crucial components of the complex structure called social space. Who determines values and norms or sets up the rules? Lefebvre held capitalism accountable for governing the social space, even everyday life, by exploiting or bringing in value systems. Indian reality is far removed and complex from the West. Here, capitalist forces, in accordance with traditions, customs, forms of inequality, political institutions, the state, and religion, determine the value system that affects the formation of social space. Public space is a place to examine those values and social/legal norms that shape and control everyday public life.

To control everyday public life, urban public spaces have been designed for civilians rather than by civilians. Stakeholders installed surveillance systems, defensive or social disciplinary designs, and instructions to control the physical and psychological behaviours of civilians in public settings. However, social disciplinary measures may not be as common in Indian public spaces as they are on the Western continent. Even so, it does exist in the perception of Indian society at large. Using art as a catalyst, I try to trace that mark of separation that redefines and transforms social conduct in public spaces.