Fight fake news, make instant images at Students' Biennale

students-biennale-fake-news The Fake-o-Scope and the questionnaire offered by two artists at the Students' Biennale

For the past two years, Animesh Mahata and Sudipta Karmakar from Banaras Hindu University have been working on a project to create awareness about the dissemination of fake news.

Images of Obama watching Modi on news and Mahatma Gandhi dancing with a girl made huge fuss in social media. Everyone believed these to be originals at first glance. It was only after days that these images were proved to be fake.

Karmakar and Mahata designed their installation for the Students’ Biennale with the motive to create awareness about this. The ‘Fake-o-Scope’ reveals a set of fake pictures alongside the original ones.

When asked about the inspiration behind this concept, Mahata says: “This is something that has been on my mind for some time. There has been an increase in the circulation of fake news in the last four years. We wanted to create awareness about this.” To make the installation interactive, the duo offer a question to find the original from a set of four pictures.

Mahata and Karmakar plan to continue batting fake news in the future. You can find their Fake-o-Scope at Mohammed Ali Warehouse.

In Armaan Building, Anuja Dasgupta of Ambedkar University, Delhi presents a room-sized pinhole camera obscura. The dark room has a single hole on one side and the opposite wall reflects the image from outside, upside down. It appears in black and white to us, but for Dasgupta who has stayed inside the darkroom for hours exploring the light pattern, it reveals colours.

Combining the concept of camera obscura and a Polaroid camera, her work is about making instant images using our hands as the shutter. Every spectator gets a chance to make an instant image, which will be developed by her later.

Dasgupta has gone to some lengths to make her camera obscura. As she could not get a roller, she had to dismantle an instant camera so that she could use the one in it to process the images. “Because you won’t get these kinds of rollers, I brought an instant camera and dismantled it. It broke my heart!” she says, pointing to the roller inside a Polaroid camera. Dasgupta, when not busy with the Biennale, works as a documentary photographer.

The Students’ Biennale was inaugurated on Thursday at 12pm in Cabral Yard. The third edition of the Students’ Biennale exhibits the works of over 200 students from across India and some of the neighbouring countries. It is being held across six venues. Apart from Mohammed Ali Warehouse and Armaan Building, other venues include VKL, Mattanchery Temple, Kishore Spices, KVN Arcade and Coir Building.