Delhi-based photographer Gauri Gill documents remnants of disparate cities 

Photographer Gauri Gill from Delhi has spent decades meeting and documenting Indian communities. Among the various projects that she has worked on over the years, ‘Rememory’, a series of urban landscapes that she began in 2003, has evolved to encompass evocative photographs of elements that make a city.

As stated by art curator Natasha Ginwala, the series “excavates the collective debris of socio-political fantasies and failures through Gill’s lens” thereby highlighting tales of aspirations and alienation in cities.

Currently on display at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, this series is a part of an exhibition titled Sheher, Prakriti, Devi, curated by Gill herself. We speak to the Delhi-based artist about the evolution of the photo series and her research process. Excerpts...

What was the initial intent and how has the series evolved over the years?

Beginning in 1999, I was spending a lot of time in rural India, travelling extensively and spending long stretches of time in Western Rajasthan. Emerging from sequestered time in the village, I would encounter the city in a different way, and consider various aspects I had never noticed before.

For instance, I rarely saw cupboards in the village, or gates restricting access, or stuffed animals. I began to document these oddities, or as I saw it then, the neuroses of urban life and people. The space between village and city in these border towns was also immensely productive, in that one could see all kinds of hybridity emerge from it, for instance vernacular forms of architecture mixed in with influences from more cosmopolitan cities, absorbed in turn from other countries and times.

These homegrown forms contained a multiverse of aspirations and desires, versus the more impersonal buildings and interiors that emerge from global architects’ imaginations and might look the same from China to Mumbai.

Over time, new narratives emerged from the fragments I gathered in travels across small towns and large cities across India—how nature is transfigured and diminished in the city, the advertising that we observe and that observes and ultimately consumes us—in that we find ourselves ultimately inside it—and so on.

How did you begin this photography project?

Time is the laboratory I work in, and of photography itself, isn’t it? Things change across moments and years, as do we ourselves. The research is grounded upon years of repeated looking, visiting places to learn for myself, asking questions of people and places, and then retrospectively trying to connect the many, many dots.

The series keeps human beings out of the frame. What does their material absence signify in the series?

The humans are everywhere in this series through what we make and how we aspire to live. ‘Rememory’ is in fact about the human hand and imagination at play. Here, I was primarily interested in what it is that we are choosing to build—our desires, world making and habitations, rather than the human form itself.

Do you think monochromatic tones add to the tension the photographs emulate?

Yes, I wanted to abstract the spaces and to focus us on the emotional content, if you will. In a way, these are psychological pictures of the city. It’s always hard for me to divorce feeling from my work, which is perhaps why I then spend years letting it sit so that I can distill it and think about it conceptually. But the initial impulse is emotionally driven, and sometimes better suited to monochromatic tones, perhaps for that very reason.

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE WORLD

The exhibition titled Sheher, Prakriti, Devi features Forms of the Devi, 2020-2021 by a Warli artist Ladhki Devi and Drawing from Life, 2019-20 by Vinnie Gill along with Rememory, 2003 by Gauri Gill.

For this exhibition, Ladhki Devi has created 14 representations of the Devi. Artist Vinnie Gill, who draws inspiration from nature, has been experimentingpastels, Chinese pigment paints, Rotring pens, watercolours, acrylics, and oil paints. Both the artists are exhibiting for the first time. The exhibition is on display till January 5.