PHOTO:Gauri Gill-Traces
Trained as a painter and applied artist, Gauri Gill has consistently advocated for and supported other artists, both those trained in art colleges and those who received informal training outside of institutions, and embraced collaboration in her work. In addition to working closely with the subjects of her photographs, Gill has also expanded her practice by incorporating materials made by others.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museum Tinguely Archive
Gauri Gill’s solo exhibition “Traces” features two series drawn from her extensive archive. Her photographs explore approaches to death, memory and the cycle of life in the gravity of the desert of West Rajasthan. In their modesty and stark directness, they contrast with the opulent baroque character of the traditional motif of the dance of death. The extensive project “Notes from the Desert” (1999- ) is a photographic archive taken during repeated visits made over a decade to desolate parts of Western Rajasthan, the photographs in Gauri Gill’s “Notes from the Desert” portray members of various rural communities who inhabit these arid borderlands of India. Nomads and migrants, minorities and peasants, all struggling to sustain themselves and their families, the people pictured are not only territorially marginalized but lead precarious lives, their existences largely spectral, invisible to the majority of Indian society. The body of work encompasses various narratives and sub-series within it, and uses different forms of image making. There are photographs structured around performance and portraits, some spontaneous, others created in collaboration with her subjects. It includes posed pictures made in a tent studio on the one hand (Balika Mela); cinema-verite intimate portraits on the other (Birth Series, Jannat); those that are staged in real life environments; or using negatives made and discarded by others (Ruined Rainbow). The work references vernacular and popular practices of photography and image making often found in and around the village, including the studio portrait, passport photo, religious calendar art and Bollywood posters. The archive also contains images without visible persons, yet containing human presence, for instance, documenting drawings in schools in The Mark on the Wall; and graves. Gauri hopes to eventually publish the work as a series of individual books, each book a note from the desert. The first one, “Balika Mela”, was published in 2012. The series “Traces” memorializes unmarked and marked graves in the desert. The handmade graves belong to people with relatively few economic resources: peasants, nomads and other inhabitants of remote villages in Western Rajasthan; and from both the Muslim and Hindu communities, pointing to a more heterogeneous complexity of the local population and contradicting the conservative formulations of nationalist politics in India today. Created from materials found in nature, the graves exist lightly upon the earth’s surface. They might include personal offerings from the home, or individually hand-inscribed gravestones. Over time, they are reabsorbed by the landscape as they are imbibed by other creatures of the earth, or erased by sand and the elements. Either partly embraced or nearly wholly immersed, each site is as unique and significant as a monumental work of art, although free of the heavy subjectivity of permanent historical record. As visual documents of these ephemeral constructions, Gill’s images occupy overlapping definitions of symbolic cognition. The “Birth Series”, a series of 8 photographs, is the most cataclysmic of the exhibition. Kasumbi Dai, her face etched with a thousand lines, delivers her grandchild with her bare hands. The to-be-mother’s face is veiled, as she pushes out the baby, grasping and straining with the help of Kasumbi’s assistant. Nearby, a school going boy sleeps through it all. The sac bursts, the baby’s head emerges, and lo she is out, her first gasp of life in the sand! Bearing witness to something as primal and magical as this, outside all bourgeois notions of privacy, is an honor only bestowed on the trusted. The wide angle mid shot, allows Gauri to bend and rise in participation. Not too close, not too far; dignity can still be affirmed! Kasumbi Dai died in 2010.
Info: Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 2, Basel, Duration: 13/6-6/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.tinguely.ch
