Bio

Soham Raha (b. 1994, Kolkata, India) is a contemporary visual artist and researcher based in New Delhi. He holds a BFA from the College of Art, New Delhi, and an MFA from Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai. Working across painting, drawing, installation, and sound, his practice investigates the intersections of digital culture, material history, and memory. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Artists Statement

My practice investigates how images shape human consciousness. I am interested in the ways visual culture mediates memory, identity, belief, and perception, and how these experiences continue to evolve within an increasingly digital world. Rather than treating images as representations of reality, I approach them as active agents that carry histories, emotions, and cultural values while constantly acquiring new meanings through circulation, remembrance, and reinterpretation.
Working across painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, sound, and installation, I construct visual environments where historical references, devotional traditions, popular culture, personal memories, and digital imagery intersect. These encounters are not intended to reconstruct history or autobiography, but to reveal how different visual systems coexist within contemporary consciousness. My works often unfold through accumulation, fragmentation, and interruption, reflecting the nonlinear ways in which images are encountered, stored, and recalled.
Research forms the foundation of my practice. I engage with museum collections, manuscripts, miniature painting, folk traditions, material culture, and archival sources alongside everyday digital experiences. Rather than preserving these references as fixed histories, I relocate them within new painterly contexts, allowing unexpected relationships to emerge across temporal, cultural, and technological boundaries.
Material is central to this process. I combine natural pigments with acrylic, oil, collage, embroidery, printmaking, and other processes, allowing handcrafted surfaces to coexist with visual vocabularies shaped by pixels, glitches, compression, and digital interfaces. These elements are not employed as oppositions between analogue and digital; instead, they acknowledge that both have become inseparable conditions through which we experience and understand the world.
Underlying my practice is an interest in painting as a site of inquiry rather than illustration. Each body of work begins with a distinct research question, yet all explore how images continue to construct, transform, and transmit human experience. By bringing historical visual cultures into dialogue with contemporary technologies, I seek to create spaces where memory, perception, and imagination remain open, unstable, and continually renegotiated.