#FaunaOfMirrors: An unbearable lightness of being

By Aishwarya Arumbakkam (IND)

Ahp is a fictional exploration of a female ghost popular in the Cambodian folklore and public imagination. Aishwarya through her work brings forth the point of view of those who are forbidden, feared and excluded as ‘other’ in the society.

She felt a kinship with this misunderstood female ghost and thus decided to retell the story from the point-of-view of the Ahp, a point-of-view she felt closer to. This work was created during the 12th Angkor Photography Festival & Workshops, Cambodia. Read more

By Anna Fox (UK)

Country Girls is a series of highly charged, colour photographs narrating dark tales that grew out of a concern for the problem violence against women in the rural South of England. 

Anna and the model/subject (singer/artist Alison Goldfrapp) worked collaboratively through performance and improvisation, styling and ultimately photography to create a series of seductive, fictional images, responding to their own experiences of growing up in the countryside in the late 1970s. Read more

Catherine Leutenegger’s ‘Kodak City’ series, reveals what remains of Kodak as a business and the ways in which the decline of the company impacted the city of Rochester. It is a testimony that is both engaged and objective, covering a part of America’s industrial heritage that faces inevitable disappearance.

By Gauri Gill (IND)

An ongoing body of work that assumed its form within a village of Adivasi paper mache artists from the Kokna tribe in Jawhar district. Further inland from Dahanu, it is one of the most impoverished districts in Maharashtra.

In 2014, Gill collaborated and commissioned acclaimed brothers Subhas and Bhagvan Dharma Kadu, sons of the legendary craftsman Dharma Kadu, along with their families and fellow volunteers, to create a new set of masks—not of gods or demons as per local tradition and lore, but rather as representing beings existing in contemporary reality.

The interpretive creations were to come from them, with the suggestion that they embody different ages, distinctive individuals, the varied rasas (emotions) like love, sadness, fear or anger, and those experiences common to all humans, such as sickness, relationships, or aging.

In the course of dialogue, animals were naturally understood to be a part of this universe. Later, precious objects entered the frame, as they are believed have sentience too. Inhabiting these masks, a cast of ‘actor’ volunteers (including the artists) would later improvise and   Read more

By Indu Antony (IND)

This is the story of how thirteen queer women aimed to capture the raw masculine energy and style in them and sneaked out of their female bodies.  

They dreamed drag to bend gender. Being drag kings was of course a pleasurable pursuit, but to them, it was more about erasing restrictive gender boxes. Read more

By Kowshik Vasudevan (IND)

Adolf Hitler gifted King Tribhuvan of Nepal with the 1938 model Mercedes Benz, the first car ever seen in Nepal. It was carried to the capital by men on their shoulders. Back then, there were no roads towards the city of Kathmandu.  

In Nepal, every automobile is cherished for years by its owners. Then the new version comes out, and the old ones are abandoned. As technology, buying capacity and fashion change over time, so do the relevance of the cars. Read more

By Manit Sriwanichpoom (IDN)

Horror in Pink was intended to provoke criticism of the consumerist fever in Thailand that enslaved its people and eventually led to a financial crisis that ended the country’s status as an Asian Tiger economy. 

Through this work, he intentionally positions the Pink Man - 'a Thai man without a conscience', against the backdrop of the state-controlled narrative of violent incidents across history and introduces them to the current generation, to refresh their memories.  Read more

By Nalini Malani (IND)

Nalini's first photogram titled Precincts, and has a linear structure, much like an architectural drawing. It was realized by placing different paper cut-outs and objects for a specific length of time under the enlarger on photosensitive bromide paper.  

The photograms became progressively complex, with different types of materials – opaque, translucent and transparent. Tonal nuances and minute variations were further achieved by ‘dodging’, a technique she learnt from her close friend, the artist Nasreen Mohamedi. Read more 

By Nadhini Valli Muthiah (IND)

The Devotee brings you face to face with a group of the Sabarimalai pilgrims. It is a study, of cultural anthropological fashion and looks at the pilgrim of Sabarimalai as a mini community within society. 

Sabarimalai is a temple in Kerala, India, whose devotees are mostly men (women over the age of 55 and under the age of 10 are permitted to enter the temple though). 

By Navjot Atlaf (IND)

Coal/iron ore mining in South Bastar District and Northern Central parts of Chhattisgarh State moves with furious energy; in the opposite direction- causing destruction and slow violence. ‘Soul Breath Wind’ addresses how systems of relationship are disrupted at different levels, which open up questions concerning what and who are we really caring for in the absence of affective political will and lacuna in law.

By P. Sainath (IND)

People's Archive of Rural India (PARI), launched on December 2014, aims at capturing the ‘everyday lives of everyday people’ – their labor, languages, livelihoods, arts, crafts and many other aspects of rural India.

PARI is a platform that combines video, audio, still photography, and print to recount stories from the Indian countryside, and anyone is welcome to contribute to PARI as long as the material meets their mandate.  Read more

By Vijay Jodha (IND)

Since 1995, India’s agrarian crisis has claimed over 300,000 lives by way of farmer suicides. The survivors, predominantly widows, are both victims and the first witnesses in this on-going tragedy. 

By Vivan Sundaram (IND)

Retake of Amrita, is a series of black and white digitally manipulated images based on the photographs from Sher Gil's family taken by the original photographer Umrao Singh, Sundaram's grandfather.  

In Sundaram’s computer-assisted interventions, these vivid personalities are transported backwards and forwards in time (as though death were permeable), to places assembled from several places. Read more