Notes from the Desert 1999 - 2010
This extensive series is drawn from more than ten years of Gauri Gill visiting her friends
among rural communities in Western Rajasthan, including Jogi nomads, Muslim migrants and Bishnoi
peasants. The set of pictures is also structured around performance and portraits; some spontaneous,
many posed in collaboration with their subjects. It includes the Balika Mela Portraits at one end of
the spectrum - posed pictures made in a tent in Lunkaransar town; unplanned and spontaneous,
candid portraits at the other end; and finally those photographs that were staged in people’s real life
environments, and so combined both practices. 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 exhibition also includes the Birth Series; and the Ruined Rainbow Pictures, the only color
works in the entire show.
“To set up a photographic project in rural Rajasthan, in black and white, stretching over a decade, goes
against the grain of several stereotypes; and signals the maturing of a ‘voice’ within the corpus of Photography
in India. Defrocked of its color and tourism potential, Rajasthan, is scoured at the nomadic margins; revealing
lives in transition: epic cycles of birth, death, drought, flood, celebration and devastation, through which they pass.
The extremity of the situation requires no illustration or pictorialism- those vexed twins of the colonial legacyespecially
from an insider, or the one who is led by the hand. Her subjects take her into their world, and she goes
there like Alice. Her method embraces ‘Time’- which does not ‘naturally’ exist inside a photograph, beyond the
epiphany and commemoration of a moment (photography’s melancholy and limitation is precisely this)- within
a structure of intimacy and relationships that unravel their mysteries slowly.”
From Anita Dube’s notes on the show in Delhi, published in Art India and Du magazine 2010.
About the Artist:
Gauri Gill (b. 1970)
Gauri Gill received a BFA in Applied Art from the Delhi College of Art in 1992 and
a second BFA in Photography from the Parsons School of Design in New York in
1994. She received her MFA in Art from Stanford University in California.
Her second solo exhibition ‘Notes from the Desert’ was exhibited at Nature
Morte Gallery, New Delhi and Matthieu Foss Gallery Mumbai (2010 -11). Her
first solo exhibition ‘The Americans’ was exhibited at Bose Pacia Gallery, Kolkata;
Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi; Matthieu Foss Gallery, Mumbai; the Thomas
Welton Art Gallery, Stanford University; the Chicago Cultural Centre, Chicago and
Bose Pacia Gallery, New York (2008 - 2009) and is still traveling. Her works have
been included in important group exhibitions including ‘Where Three Dreams
Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh’ (Whitechapel
Gallery, London and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland); ‘The Self and the
Other: Portraiture in Contemporary Indian Photography’ (Palau de la Virreina,
Barcelona); ‘Public Places, Private Spaces’ (Newark Museum, New Jersey); ‘Shifting
Shapes: Unstable Signs’ (Yale Art Gallery, Yale University, New Haven); as well as
in a two person show with Tomoko Yoneda at Lucy Mackintosh Gallery, Lausanne
called ‘Rememory’; and with Sunil Gupta at the India International Center in New
Delhi, ‘Gill and Gupta’.
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