Philippe Calia is an artist, photographer and filmmaker, currently based in Bangalore, India.
It is in 2006, during his training years in social sciences, that Calia first moved to India as an exchange-program student. Back in Europe a year later, he specialised on the region during a research Master in Comparative Politics in Paris, followed by an M.A in Photographic Studies in London. Finally settling in Mumbai in 2011, he started developing a long-term/documentary approach to his work.
Today he sees his practice as gravitating mostly around two poles : the urban experience and the notion of memory. Often manoeuvring at the intersection of the still and moving image, as well as figuration and abstraction, his works tend to incorporate discarded documents and mundane visual material through gestures of quotation, collage or erasure. Manners of perceiving, preserving and commemorating are always central to his approach.
Calia's work has received several awards and has been exhibited in various institutions, galeries and festivals across Europe and Asia including the Rencontres d’Arles (France, 2023); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Germany,2023); SIPF (Singapore, 2022); UP Gallery (Taïwan, 2021).
In India, he is represented by TARQ (Mumbai), where is first solo show, Lēthē, was held in 2022. His photo and video works have been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, Le Monde, Art India or The Indian Quarterly.
Since 2013, Calia has also been collaborating as a photo editor with PIX, a publication for photography and new media in South Asia. Between 2015 and 2020, he co-directed BIND, a platform for photobooks in India with a public library.