Curators: Annette Kisling, Amarnath Praful, Rishi Singhal, Arthur Zalewski
Participating Artists: Tarique Ahamed, Sabrina Asche, Swasti Bharti, Max Bodenstedt, Johannes Ernst, Vamika Jain, Annette Kisling, Kush Kukreja, Sophie Meuresch, Shreyasi Pathak, Amarnath Praful, Sunny Pudert, Mohan R, Juli Schmidt, Riti Sengupta, Sidharthan, Sourav Sil, Rishi Singhal, Matteo Visentin, Anna Voswinckel, Arthur Zalewski
On the initiative of Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, an exchange programme was organised between the photography departments of the National Institute of Design (NID), Gandhinagar and the Academy of Fine Arts (HGB), Leipzig which ran for a period of 4 years between 2016 and 2019. Altogether 16 students and 5 faculty from the two institutions took part in the project.
The exhibition explores a spectrum of 21 photographic projects from students and faculty that stems out of this peculiar moment - the new and the sudden shift in culture, geography and time. The photographic works presented in the exhibition were produced as the participants ventured to make new meanings out of unfamiliar settings. How does one gaze through this moment of transition? To what extent can the artist’s practice and contexts in India and Germany, be transferred and translated to the country in which they are guests at this particular moment?
Photography, an ineluctable product of industrial modernity, perhaps corrupts this notion of unfamiliar with its affinity for expanded mobilities. Everything that exists affirms its existence by travelling to us, through images, populating our books, screens and minds. We already know about a place even before we have actually been there. How does then one respond, through images, when they themselves become a subject of travelling?
When one travels, the histories of nation and culture get enmeshed with the history of one’s being in this world. It is through this situation that one looks at a temporary home, a cage, a monument, a train or an album of photographs. Even if there are points of uncertainty, there are also moments of awareness: about one’s own image-making practice as well as the practice of looking at images. This exhibition brings together the intersection of all these dispositions as a set of responses to the condition of moving from one place to another and inhabiting a new location with an older self.
PLEASE NOTE: The gallery will reopen post lockdown, the closing date of the exhibition will be announced then!
