PHOTOFILE | REVIEW
DECONSTRUCTING INDIGENOUS
PHOTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES
A fascinating glimpse into the world of indigenised photography
PHOTOINK Gallery Indian Art Fair 2023 / NSIC Exhibition Grounds, Okhla, New Delhi / 9 - 12 Feb 2023
The yearly Indian Art Fair in New Delhi, India, prominent platform which exhibits works of contemporary South Asia, including works by modern masters, dialect artists, and emerging artists. The fair's programme emphasises art and the artist's voice and brings together museums and galleries, private foundations and arts charities, artists' collectives and national museums, and cultural events and festivals so local and international audiences can experience the region's rich cultural heritage in new and exciting ways.
Just as there was a wide variety of artists, similarly was there a broad diversity of mediums employed by those artists, ranging from the traditional native technique to the cutting-edge innovations of modern new media. The most fascinating aspect was seeing how digital art has progressed throughout the span of time. As images are increasingly employed as metaphor and symbol to represent abstract ideas, photography's position as a visual art medium has grown efficiently. Photography has been used to record indigenous cultures and traditions.
Pictoriality photographs from the 1920s, traditional black and white street photography, colour iPhone street photography, industrial photography, intricately constructed tableaus combining photography, sculpture, puppetry, and drawing, re-photographed images from films, re-configured and painted vernacular photographs, and images made using AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems in 2022 are all included in PHOTOINK's eclectic exhibition which was part of the fair. The exhibition, which features works by 10 artists, is a multifaceted exploration of the shifting relationship between images and what we call reality over the course of a century, leading up to the present moment when photography's ontological connection to the physical, visible world is being interrogated. Despite their variety, the pieces chosen from the work of 10 artists are a monument to the strength and allure of photography as a medium, as well as to its potential to assume many forms in response to the passing of time.
Ruliaram Roopchand Bharadwaj, a forgotten pictorialism, possessed an unusual command of natural light, which he used to great effect in his 1920s images of clouds, trees, and plants, giving them an eerie, atmospheric quality. The gardens of Chandigarh are the common thread in the moving staged pictures of friends that Farheen Fatima paints. She often paints on images from her friends' family albums.
The industrial work of two of India's best photographers, Madan Mahatta and Ahmed Ali, is juxtaposed with the photographer's eye observing nature's beautiful richness in two distinct centuries. Mahatta's images of grand industrial spaces where labouring bodies are dwarfed by machinery are offset by absorbing portraits of the newly empowered post-independence woman in her industrial workspace, creating a fascinating historical record of industry and labour from the 1950s to the 1970s as part of the process of nation building in a young democracy.
While Raghu Rai's unique, socially-grounded eye captures the chaotic dramaturgy of the street in sharp monochrome, Ketaki Sheth uses her iPhone as a note-taking device as she strolls along Marine Drive at night, the capricious blue-black sea and sky serving as changing studio backdrops against which the city and its people go about their business.
We enter Roger Ballen's darkly weird psychoscapes from the street, following the narrative of a half-human, half-animal creature who lives a solitary life apart from the rest of civilisation through a series of oppressively sharp black and white images.
Prateek Arora's AI-generated visuals, in conversation with Roger the Rat, use visual effects–heavy genre movies, primarily science fiction and horror, and other elements of popular culture to build a fictitious universe in Old Delhi. Prateek's fantastical figures are hybrid people with slightly off eyes, crooked fingers, distorted shadows, and incomprehensible reflections; they represent the precarious time when photography began its tryst with emerging artificial intelligence imaging technologies that aspire to the photo-real.
Two of the PHOTOINK artists, in contrast to the act of making images, mine repositories of pre-existing imagery, both personal and public, spanning from the family album to world cinema, tapping into cultural and historical imaginaries, playing with archetypes and tropes, and interrogating institutions and ideas ranging from the family to religion to the state to history to landscape and portraiture. By putting together pictures from holidays her father photographed, Yashna Kaul is able to get insight into his experience with early-onset Alzheimer's. The lack of her likeness in her artwork is indicative of a troubled family past, particularly the taboo topics of polygamy and alienation. By re-photographing films with radically different aspect ratios and formats, different colour processes, and films played back on TV, tape, and disc, Madhuban Mitra and Manas Bhattacharya provide a practical example of media archaeology and construct a pictorial history of 20th-century imaging and imagining.
From European representations to the Indigenous gaze, museums continue to seek their way through the decolonizing process while offering new narratives of cultural encounters. However, this process is as long as it is complex and involves a many other issues and struggles, amongst which the question of repatriations and returns which is fueled by the call for reparation and healing from those communities, hoping to co-create a more inclusive future thanks to this collaborative reflection on the past.