https://www.facebook.com/624230831381144/

Bihan Das, Kanpur (2026)

13/01/2026

By hand/hand made/hand crafted.

From an eco print & dyeing workshop at APPROACH, IIT Kanpur.
(ain't we all?)

01/01/2026

I refuse to be governed by aspects of cringe. This post is for my memory only and I couldn't care less about the aesthetics of it. Food isn't always supposed to be organised and colourful indoors which are organised and colourful. Food exists for people who consume it, not for the algorithm. I'm lucky to have been blessed with plates such as these and many more this year. To every recipe I've failed and to everyone who fed me- thank you, kindly invite me more often, I like you all and the food you cook.'k bye!

01/11/2025

About 6 years ago or so I got my first hands on experience in cyanotype by helping develop his prints. The department of Graphic Art in Kala Bhavan had created an environment where upon we were experimenting with digital and analogue techniques alongside our printmaking practices. While cyanotype was touted a slow and limited process, I found the premise of contact photography and the brilliant blue a little too interesting to stop. About 3 years ago - I hosted my first cyanotype workshop for the Arthshilla center at Santiniketan. We looked for a title that'd help people understand the technique ,beyond the technical know how's. Finally I settled upon "basics of Blueprints" as the title.
Over the years I've had the fortune and the pleasure of hosting a few demonstrations. Yes, they have been less than perfect and continue to be so.
As I was recently given the opportunity to host another workshop this month(25 & 26th October'25), I settled back up on the name -"basics of Blueprints". We had an intense two day session going over the basics, the exposure timings, the potential for coffee toning and finally culminating in a collective excercise on fabric.
What started as a whimsical one day session with 's portable light box has now turned into an excersize which slowly continues to develop across sites.

Yes, I will continue to work with this medium.
And yes, I would love the opportunity to yap more about it.

Thanks to the Prof. S.T. Roy, DoD, IIT K & APPROACH Cell team for helping me in my journey of yapping about blueprints.

Thank you for reading!

05/10/2025

Hands, yours and mine, but mostly yours.

I lose track of projects and archives and ideas I want to make. I live in a dazed space where nothing but dizziness seems to be a permanent tenant. In this half drunk half aloof in my own body situation - I discontinue readings, interests, documents and writings. But a person is a person after all, no matter how dizzy one is, there is a sense of self. This self of mine still remembered to keep clicking the hands of the people who surround me daily. Who listens to me yap about my health for the nth time and follows it up the day after by dropping a text to check up. Some call once in a while, some accompany me to the hospitals, some knock on my hollow head when I speak of a bleek tomorrow and some while painted bring me a moment of escape. I like them. The people and the paintings. They are nice.

Ps. There are those who keep in touch via the web 🕸️🕷️ thank you. The memes help.

25/09/2025

Back in 2020, I was going insane locked up in rooms and my home felt smaller as the days passed by waiting for the water to boil.
I became a little obsessed with the metallic kettle my sister had purchased off of Amazon. It was shiny and I was always like a collector robin taken to shiny things. It was my own magic sphere reflecting everything but itself. Shiny, oval, beautiful but a little bit twisted.
Just twisted enough for you to tell the reflection isn't normal.
Like a masked personality that is distracting you with 'shinyness' while boiling internally, snarling. Like a person who has forgotten to be original - like an artist who puts catchy post soviet songs with his old sketches because he sketches no longer and misses how he used to.

life.

31/08/2025

23°48′37″N 87°47′44″E
"A Battleship rests in the Land"

On the damp morning of 24th July, we headed down the broken road out of Santi, on a bike with half broken suspensions.
Clouds hung overhead and frequent rains made us seek shelter in old temples and tea shops. While on the way to Hansuli bank where the Kopai river forms a near perfect crescent to meet Bakreshwar - we encountered curious sites. New clusters of cement based brick industries, that poke through the paddy fields. Less obvious than their predecessors who now lie outlawed in the river banks of Birbhum.
Long have they feasted on what little fertile soil there was in the red soils. Their chimneys were once blowing a fake triumph of local industrialisation, of development and economic growth. The towers loom over the moats, now no longer fed coal and earth.
They seem like old ships moored to the land, waiting for their fateful decay. Clicking one too many pictures here will have you shoo'd away. The shepherds now grace this overgrown land, unafraid of the little CCTV's ugly eyes. What will the land owners even say? Most of these were illegal, one of them retorted.
'My father used to work here, what good did it bring him? Did they pay well? Did he earn enough for a house? The people who used to run these now live in Rampurhat. In stone houses. They don't use bricks.'
That very evening we ended up in Tokarun, looking at paintings by Mani da. Like many other stupid thoughts, I actively think of, I thought - What if we put gigantic palm leaves on top of the towers, will it look like the old ink landscapes? Will the landscape look like it had never been there? Will all the glory it promised disappear perhaps till the next election? What a stupid thought indeed!

Thank you for reading.

18/08/2025

Living temple, Vanishing murals.
Nurpur, Himachal Pradesh.
18.08.25

A beautiful mural - depicting the world, krishnas lore and more, made somewhere in the early to mid 1700's in the high hills of Himachal Valleys. As I enjoyed what my mother whispered to be an application Jaipuri Mural techniques - I was taken aback by the state of things. Murals were fast fading, faded to the sunlight if they were lucky enough to have survived the coats of white lime wash. The space is in a limbo, it no longer needs murals to spread the glorious myths, and flowers and neons substitute the presence of the divine. As I stood in the presence of the new sound systems and neon lights bolted on painted walls, I wondered how fleeting it seemed. The mural had survived for a couple centuries before reaching the state it is in. As if the walls had been its own fort, like the one it is housed in, now lay crumbling, as the paintings make a feeble last stand for survival against the synthetic curtains, printed photos and tubs of primers and paints.

an experience curated by .c.h.o.e.s

26/03/2025

Sketchbook s**t posting is necessary in the age of AI.

A lot of words get thrown around AI and its role in the creative space. Generator, plagiarisms and such. As we sit and debate the discourses of AI, companies quietly train their algorithm on paintings and photographs. If that is inevitable as it seems to be now and my feeble uninformed attempt at resistance is as pointless - then let AI should at the least be filled with images of human chaos. The AI creative space has quickly found itself in an echo chamber where bots comment on bot generated pictures to define what good images are. If so, I see what we call s**t posting as necessary means of space preservation, for dialogue.To not post for the bot market, to not reduce my everyday scribbles to good and bad but to let it exist in the data pool which engineers call "cloud" to make it appear as if it was as natural as the sky.

How much am I expected to 'hustle' or monetise my 'content'? Galleries do it differently, AI does it in other ways. At least the Galleries only rummage through and sell the sketchbooks of famous artists who have passed away. AI not so much, if it is probably online, they probably have it. Then it must read my gibberish as an insignificant nail in a pile of heavenly hay like perfect images of will smith eating spaghetti.
(Google will smith eating spaghetti ai progress& you will be entertained or horrified)

Thank you for reading.
No I am really not attempting to make any sense but it kind of does in my head.

17/03/2025

Heritage hangout.
Courtney of & Anil Ji.
In and around Kanpur Dehat - 30 Jan'25

1. Ruins of a char bag (?) - state highway 46 to jahanabad, opposite of a beautiful 'Sorahi' temple.
2. Remains of a Deul style vishnu temple, Kurtha
3. Oldest remaining terracotta hindu temple - complete with a shrine & Shikhara, 5th/6th century, Bhitergaon
4. Stone carvings left to battle the weather, Behta Bujurg
5. Curious murals at the Ramtalai temple, the complex stands complete with several shrines enclosed in a fort like structure with a water reservoir dug next to it.
6. What remains now of a glorious Mughal gardens 'sarai khana', Fatehpur
7. Admiring the fashion of the Bujurgs of Behta Bujurg
8. Uncle's debating affairs of the worldly world, chaturbhuj baba ( a name later given to the Gupta era brick temple - Sahasa), Tendulia
9. Temple of Phoolmati Devi, Bihoopur
10. Beautiful brick temples at Nibia Khera.

Some information has been sourced from the web.
Thanks for reading.
Will see you all on another episode of Bihan doing random stuff.

26/02/2025

Goofing about.
Sangam Ghat, Allahabad'25

* Toy vending uncle sat near sangam Ghat on the way to akbar fort. His name is Jitendra, hails from Ara in Bihar. Do visit him if you can and he is still there.

28/01/2025

The new face of a spiritual festival is not to do with act but the documentation of the act. The camera man is a tool of propagating the significance of a holy journey. Beyond the crowd of dslr wielding, sadhus portrait taking crowds of people lies a new group - reel makers, vloggers & tik tokers.

Armed with mobile phones and amateur setups they bring in much needed viewership in numbers and languages(Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Maithili, e.t.c)from across the northern plains and other parts of the world. The vloggers help solidify the success of a personal journey in the public memory.(Telling you why you should take it next year.)

16/09/2024

adventures & misadventures, Bithoor, UP.
15.09.24

1. Old haveli, partially restored by ASI, Rani Laxmi Bai Ghat.
2. Brahmavarta Ghat
3. The absolute mismanagement at Bithoor museum
4. Never knew Rani Laxmi Bai was photographed with such clarity!
5. Murals at Bithoor
6. Vote for anu mahato, press the gun symbol.
7. Nana Rao Peshwaji Smarak Park at Bithoor.
8. Velocity restaurant, Kanpur
9. Velocity but of an autorickshaw.

Fin.

Bihan Das

13/01/2026

01/01/2026

01/11/2025

05/10/2025

25/09/2025

31/08/2025

18/08/2025

26/03/2025

17/03/2025

26/02/2025

28/01/2025

16/09/2024

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category