Gauri Gill  Acts of Appearance

EDITION PATRICK FREY | 2022

Gauri Gill's ambitious new book Acts of Appearance, titled after her series of photographs of the same name, spans 188 pages, with 126 color images and essays in Hindi and English by Gauri Gill and Yuvraj Bhagvan Kadu.

Acts of Appearance assumed its form within a village of Adivasi papier-mâché artists from the Kokna and Warli tribes in Palghar district. Further inland from Dahanu, it is one of the most impoverished districts in Maharashtra, India. Gill’s collaborator-subjects are renowned for their papier-mâché objects, including traditional sacred masks made for the yearly Bohada procession. In these pictures, the artists as well as other local volunteers engage in everyday village activities while wearing new masks, made by them expressly for this body of work beginning in 2015. The new creations depict living beings with the physical characteristics of ordinary humans, commonplace animals, or valued objects. A range of scenarios and narratives, situated in both “reality” and dreamlike states, come together in the photographs, which simultaneously portray symbolic or playful representations as well as the familiar experiences of community members against the backdrop of their home and culture.

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Gauri Gill, Rajesh Chaitya Vangad

Fields of Sight

EDITION PATRICK FREY | 2023

Gill's new hardcover, 372 page book, explores Fields of Sight, the unique collaboration between the photographer and renowned Warli artist Rajesh Chaitya Vangad. The series, which began in early 2013 in Ganjad, Dahanu, an Adivasi village in coastal Maharashtra, India is rendered in 302 B/W images including not only the works themselves, but also key details extracted by Gill to create a dense and rich narrative, and is accompanied by Gill and Vangad's writing explaining each work. As with her other books, this one is bi-lingual in Hindi and English.

A new visual language emerged symbiotically from Gill’s initial experiences of photographing the landscape. Looking at her contact sheets, she perceived that although the camera was capturing the distinct ‘chameleon-like’ skin of the landscape, it was missing vital aspects of what was not apparent to the eye, yet was vividly relayed in the great mythical and experiential stories narrated to her by Vangad. The photographs by Gill, inscribed by drawings by Vangad, reconfigure the photographic site both formally as well as conceptually, to arrive at new documents of multiple truths and knowledge systems. In the act of viewing the landscape through the eyes of Vangad, Gill rekindles the need to challenge the way we see things today, what our eyes capture and what may elude them. ‘As though one were photographing an old home, and the resident of the house came out, and began to speak’.

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Upcoming Event

Artist Talk: Gauri Gill

LOUISIANA MUSEUM, HUMLEBÆK, DENMARK | MARCH 29 & 30 

On March 29 at 4 pm, Gauri Gill will join curator Tine Colstrup for a Walk & Talk through her ongoing exhibition at the Louisiana Museum, in Humlebæk, Denmark. On March 30, Gill will be in conversation about her books with Sonja Furu, a Danish journalist based in New Delhi. The exhibition closes on April 10, 2023. Learn more.

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