Born in 1992, Taniya Sarkar is a photographer based in Kolkata, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. She has pursued her Bachelor’s (2012) and Master’s (2015) degrees in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of Calcutta. She worked as a freelancer in the local news media during her university studies. In 2017, she went to Dhaka, Bangladesh to study professional photography at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute. She was selected as a WaterAid India fellow in 2019. During her fellowship in 2020, she witnessed massive communal violence in Delhi, the capital of India. She started documenting the aftermath of the pogrom as an independent photographer. Later on, in the same year, she started researching communal violence in her own home state, West Bengal.

Her works have been exhibited at Indian Photo Festival in 2020 and Städtische Galerie Nordhorn, Germany as part of the exhibition ‘CLOSE CONTACT’ in 2021-2022. She is a student grant recipient for The W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund (2022), Inge Morath Award 2021 (Finalist), Magnum Foundation, Generator Grant 2021, Experimenter Grant 2021, Social Documentary Grant, Murthy Nayak Foundation and SACAC in 2021. International Center of Photography (ICP) New York, awarded her the most prestigious Mary Ellen Mark Memorial Scholarship to join the One-Year Certificate program in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism program (2021-2022).

Nothing Left to Call Home is her long-term project documenting the communal violence against women in Bengal since the partition (1946). The project unearths women’s narratives on the multi-faceted and complex communal events since India’s partition and independence in 1947, “Nothing Left to Call Home” is a visual research project centred around the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh that broadly investigates how these events have historically manifested as patriarchal violence against women since partition (1947). Her project When I Dive into the Realm of Your Endlessness is exploring grassroots perspectives, philosophy, contemplation, and artistic expressions of the Baul-Fakir women (a mystical folk tradition) who are largely sidelined and overlooked in the patriarchal environment of rural Bengal (India and Bangladesh). During her ICP days, in Broken Hallelujah she relates the journey of an independent singer-songwriter in a post-COVID world.

Sarkar’s work focuses mainly on the post-partition socio-political reality of Bengal through the stories of women. In her projects, she analyses religion, religious conflict, and counter-religion in order to identify colonial narrative gaps.