Gauri Gill at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai 2016
Gauri Gill (born 1970, Chandigarh, India) earned a BFA (Applied Art) from the College of Art, New Delhi; BFA (Photography) from Parsons School of Design / The New School , New York; and MFA (Art) from Stanford University, California. She has exhibited within India and internationally, including the 58th Venice Biennale; Museum Tinguely, Basel; MoMA PS1, New York; Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; 2016 Kochi Biennale; 7th Moscow Biennale; Wiener Library, London; and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. and Fotomuseum, Winterthur. In 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada‘s foremost award for photography.
Installation View
The Mark on the Wall
Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai 2016
Gill‘s practice is complex because it contains several lines of pursuit. These include an almost two decade long engagement with marginalised communities in rural Rajasthan called Notes from the Desert (since 1999). This ongoing archive contains sub-series such as “The Mark on the Wall”, “Traces”, “Birth Series”, “Jannat”, “Balika Mela”, and “Ruined Rainbow”. She has explored human displacement and the migrant experience in “The Americans” and “What Remains”. Projects such as the 1984 notebooks highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and ‘active listening‘, and in using photography as a memory practice. Beginning in early 2013, “Fields of Sight” is an equal collaboration with the renowned Adivasi artist, Rajesh Vangad, combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing to co-create new narratives. In her recent body of work, “Acts of Appearance”, (2015-ongoing), the artist has worked closely with the paper mache artists of the Kokna tribe in Maharashtra, using unique masks to tell fictional stories, improvised together, of contemporary life in the village. Working in both black & white and colour, Gill addresses the twinned Indian identity markers of class and community as determinants of mobility and social behaviour; in her work there is empathy, surprise, and a human concern over issues of survival.