05 May,2011 09:02 AM IST | | Swati Kumari
Girls on girls, in all piety and pathos, plus others themes fill canvases at this exhibition
After showcasing the boys' story, internationally acclaimed gay photo-artist from Delhi, Sunil Gupta tries to portray the girls' side at this exhibition titled 'Lens-ing It', which has 'series' as thematic orientation.
"From past few years, I have been working with women in love with women. Art in any form is an artist's perception of situations that he has gone through, the way he dealt with them and lessons he's learnt. So I try and depict the stereotype as a visual material," reveals Gupta. "The characters in my compositions are mostly my friends who are happy to be shot. It's just that they are shot in a different lifestyle, not their real life," he adds.
Producing meaning
Each artist in this show presents a set of works that is done with the 'same mood, sense of reflection and ideological perspective' within a limited span of time or within a prolonged period of travel and work undertaken by the artist. The works cohesively hold and display the artists' innate idea about their medium and the way they use it to 'produce' meaning. For curator Johny ML, photographing is a political act, "Today, in the globalised world, photographs have become the message carriers of change. Photographs speak to the people directly and the photography artists have become all the more aware of their worth as meaning makers."
Of memories and myths
Another participating artist, Alex Fernandes, through his 'Tiatriste and Musicians,' series search for the archetypal images that form the cultural make up of an ethnic community. Deepak John Mathew has two series of works in 'Lens-ing It' show. Done over a period of time, the first series has images from his home interior and the second one has images from an anthropological and historical museum. While Anup Mathew Thomas looks at the ways in which colonialism taken various manifestations in our contemporary personal lives. There are memories and myths that help the human beings to form an 'idea' about their own lives.
Life in monochrome
Ram Rahman's works show politicians, cultural activists, artists, lawyers and so on as the main images in them. "I am documenting things that I am usually involved with, in my normal life and I present them in black and white because that flattens and equalizes everything. I personally don't like the digital colour prints, colour becomes distracting," asserts Rahman, whose seven works are displayed here. He creates another idea of 'Delhi', which manifests in a multitude of forms, situations and people. Meanwhile, Manisha Gera Baswani's series is all about her journey through the lives of the artists and art activists within context of their work places. In these photographs, Manisha carefully collapses the idea of a secured private into the realm of a discursive public by capturing the most unguarded moments from their lives.
Lens-ing It
On till May 22
At Ashna Gallery, 369 CRC Building, MG Road, Sultanpur
Timings 11 am to 7 pm
