Debashish Paul is a contemporary Indian artist known for his unique style of performance with elaborately designed attire. Alluring and haunting at the same time, his performance revolves around gender and identity, following a multi-expressionist methodology that involves various mediums: drawing, sculpture, craft and, even, dance. Made of paper pasted on cloth and filled with drawings intimately connected to personal memories, the enormous sculptural attire he wears during his performance reveals and conceals the body's movements inside it, addressing the multiplicity of form and meaning beyond the standard codes of social behaviour. Although his performances have no connection to any rituals, there is a distinctive "ritual quality or effect;" the onlookers have an elevated experience of time that separates them, for a moment, from the mundane everydayness in which they live.
Debashish works in various mediums, from performance and video to painting and independent drawing. Besides performances and videos, for which he is best known, his paintings and drawings also explore the dialogue between the body, attire and society, stressing the indeterminacy and ambiguity of the relation. Finding it elusive, Paul situates personal freedom at the heart of the dialogue, making it an excess for the sectarian, hierarchical and heteronormative society.