{"id":10853,"date":"2019-02-21T08:10:44","date_gmt":"2019-02-21T08:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=10853"},"modified":"2020-07-24T15:22:54","modified_gmt":"2020-07-24T15:22:54","slug":"at-home-in-the-world-the-fotofest-2018-biennial-of-indian-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=10853","title":{"rendered":"At Home in the World: The FotoFest 2018 Biennial of Indian Photography"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From <\/span>Art Journal<\/span><\/em> 77, no. 4 (Winter 2018)<\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

India\/Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art<\/em><\/strong>. Fotofest 2018 Biennial, exhibition organized by Sunil Gupta and Steven Evans. Various venues, Houston, TX, March 10\u2013April 22, 2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steven Evans, ed. India\/Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art<\/em><\/strong>. With essays by Gayatri Sinha, Nada Raza, and Zahid R. Chaudhary; texts by participating artists; and intro. by Sunil Gupta. Houston: FotoFest, and Amsterdam: Schilt, 2018. 268 pp., approx. 200 ills. $60<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Houston, Texas, might not be the most obvious site for what is arguably the most significant exhibition of Indian photography to date, but to take seriously the curatorial conceit of the show, perhaps it should be. The FotoFest 2018 Biennial featured some forty-seven artists of Indian origin from around the world. Titled India\/Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art<\/em>, the exhibition showcased the remarkable diversity of personal perspectives while insinuating that there is still a meaningful unity to the experience of Indian cultural history. Spread across several main venues around the city, including three converted warehouses and the Asia Society Texas Center, the show required several visits to take in, not least because the artists\u2019 visions ranged so broadly in subject matter and approach. Although it would be nearly impossible to articulate a single take-away from an exhibition of this breadth, one issue that the work posed insistently, both as individual pieces and taken together, was how high the stakes are for articulating cultural identity of all stripes. In some cases, this concern was explicitly political, and in other cases highly personal. Most of the work in the show, however, expressed a remarkable commitment to exploring issues of cultural belonging, as opposed to, for example, more abstract formal concerns that characterize other photographic traditions. This may, of course, be explained partially by the exhibition\u2019s explicit geocultural framing. However, it also spoke to the increasing urgency of these concerns in an (art) world that is exponentially global\u2014a world in which the possibility for communication is quickly outstripping the constraints of context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exhibition was cocurated by Sunil Gupta and FotoFest director Steven Evans. Gupta is a photographer, curator, and activist who is well known in India (where he was born) as well as abroad (where he has lived for decades, first in New York, and later in London). Gupta\u2019s track record as an established artist and curator across the continents make him a natural choice for a show of this scale and ambition. His photographic practice has focused on documenting queer communities across the many cities he has called home, and this interest in communities that are in some sense on the margins of society is echoed in many of his curatorial choices throughout the exhibition. He is known as an outspoken advocate for both LGBT issues and HIV awareness. Indeed, it comes as little surprise that artists with strong ethical commitments are well represented in the exhibition\u2019s selection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a curator, Gupta is largely responsible for having brought early international awareness to the complexity of South Asian contemporary photographic practice. As he outlines in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, he began curating in the late 1980s and produced influential exhibitions such as Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh<\/em> (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2010). As the longest-running international biennial of photography in the United States, FotoFest provides a significant platform for Gupta\u2019s enduring commitment to broadening the conversation about global contemporary photography with South Asian roots. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gupta and Evans chose to define \u201ccontemporary\u201d as works completed in the year 2000 or later. This bold cut-off accounted for one of the show\u2019s great strengths: the inclusion of dozens of relatively young and fresh photographic perspectives. Many of the artists included in the exhibition are not well known even in their home country, let alone recognized by international audiences. In having sought out such new voices, the co-curators demonstrated persistent dedication to forging ever-relevant histories and took an important step in broadening a conversation long dominated by a handful of well-known names. This is not to say that the usual suspects were not included in the lineup: many of India\u2019s best-known artists were represented by their forays into photography. However, to put these established names on the walls alongside a much younger generation of artists in positions of equal standing was a strong and generous statement on the curators\u2019 part, and one that brought more complex meaning to all the images in this mammoth show. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The handsomely produced, 268-page book that accompanies the exhibition is an important complement to a survey of this size.1<\/a><\/sup> Gupta\u2019s introduction offers a brief history of photography in India and reflects especially on the opening of the genre to diverse voices and modes of experimentation in recent years. His text serves to ground the additional three essays commissioned for the show and written by the Delhi-based critic and curator Gayatri Sinha, the London-based curator Nada Raza, and Zahid R. Chaudhary, a professor in the Princeton University English department whose research has focused on early photographic practice in India. This selection of contributors reflects well the geographical scope of the exhibition, as well as the broad range of aesthetic strategies on display.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sinha\u2019s contribution, \u201cA Fine Line: The Still and Shifting Lens in Contemporary Indian Photography,\u201d begins by addressing photography\u2019s fraught inclusion in the category of art, and goes on to address photography\u2019s engagement with historical and mythological tropes, and its unique ability to allow for ludic self-representation. Most of Sinha\u2019s examples are drawn from the most established artists in the exhibition, but she also discusses lesser-known photographers in the show such as Dhruv Malhotra, Vinit Gupta, Asif Khan, and collaborators Anita Khemka and Imran B. Kokiloo. The diversity of the young artists is in part illuminated by Sinha\u2019s claim that photography is among the first art forms in India that is not bound by the traditional barriers of entry such as caste or association with a guild or family training network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raza\u2019s essay, \u201cImpersonation, Self-Invention and Memory: Iconicity and Mimesis in South Asian Photography,\u201d focuses on the particularly prevalent trend of staged photography and its relationship to history, fantasy, and the archive. Indeed, this has been one of the most distinctive modes of photographic practice in South Asia since the inception of the medium. Raza invokes a handful of historical precedents, such as Umrao Sher-Gil\u2019s family portraits, along with the photographic history of her own family to set up her discussion of how contemporary artists inhabit and subvert visual tropes in order to assert their own claims to citizenship and personal belonging. Her analysis draws on the scholarship of Christopher Pinney and engages most substantially with the practice of four women: Pushpamala N., Anita Dube, Anusha Yadav, and Indu Antony, each of whom interrogates norms of class, gender, and sexuality through performance and play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Chandan Gomes, Untitled, from the series There Are Things I Call Home<\/em>, 2009\u20132012, photograph (photograph \u00a9 Chandan Gomes; provided by Photoink Gallery, New Delhi)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The performative mimesis Raza articulates extends far beyond the work of these four artists, however. The same impulse surely characterizes the work of Annu Matthew, whose cheeky and meticulous restaging of nineteenth-century photographs of Native Americans undermines the romantic authenticity of these early ethnographic prints. In this series, An Indian from India, Matthew pairs these historical portraits with mimicked doubles in which she adopts the same pose as the original sitter but dons South Asian accessories in place of Native American ones. Hence, Feather Indian and Dot Indian are combined in a photographic diptych that illustrates the absurdity of historical accident. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A less obvious extension of Raza\u2019s discussion might be applied to Mithu Sen\u2019s project, I Have Only One Language: It Is Not Mine<\/em>\u2014a unique piece that is one of the most affecting in the show. This video work documents a very different mode of performance, in which Sen adopts the persona of Mago, \u201ca seemingly homeless person who speaks her own language.\u201d Mago is not enacted for the camera alone. Rather, Sen fully assumes the Mago persona over the course of several days as she spends time with abused girls in a government orphanage home in Kerala. This is an unusual project indeed, because Sen actively engaged a community of girls whom society had largely abandoned, through a fictional persona. The extended encounter is presented through a series of video clips that document Sen\u2019s varied interactions with the girls, who are often the ones who hold the camera and decide where it is pointed. The final result is displayed with a manipulated color spectrum that at once invokes the specter of surveillance and succeeds in concealing the identity of the orphaned girls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sen\u2019s piece relies on strategies of mimicry and performance, but rather than serving to undermine cultural stereotypes, its mode of engagement is intended to promote human connection. Sen sought to build a relationship beyond language with a group of vulnerable young women and decided that a fantasy persona could help her accomplish this. Rather than invoke the specificity of an earlier trope or time, however, Sen intended to enable a realm of imaginative play within the orphanage in which everyone could take part, stating, \u201cIt was an experience of intimacy and trust, producing physical and emotional behavior, making all involved believe in an alternative world\u201d (Sen quoted on 116).<\/p>\n\n\n\n