"In April 2016, I spent three weeks volunteering in the Kalighat Home for Dying Destitutes run by Mission of Charity in Kolkata. This Catholic monastic order founded by Mother Teresa involves many western volunteers into aiding sick and disabled socially unprotected inhabitants of the Bengalian metropolis. It is a place where the three incompatible worlds meet: the outcasts and forsaken inhabitants of Indian streets on the verge of death, the western educated and rather wealthy volunteers and the international community of nuns living the life of prayer and self-neglecting service. In my research I focused on the shocking and revealing experience of this work and individual transformations of the volunteers' worldviews and lifestyles caused by the encounter with suffering and death in the Kalighat shelter".
Egor Novikov was born in Russian Siberia and has his major in Philosophy from Saint-Petersburg University. For over ten years he works as an artist using various mediums from metal cast sculpture to oil painting. While carrying out field research as a part of the MA program on the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at CEU, he applied his artistic skills to produce drawn and photographic visuals for his thesis.