Gauri Gill is a documentarian who gathers evidence using a still camera. The information in her photographs is direct, precise and readable. But she is also a photographer for whom a collaborative approach to picture making has been essential — a collaboration with the communities she works in, collaboration with other artists and collaboration with the people within her frames. These elements continue to be overwhelmingly present in her latest exhibition of black and white photographs The Mark on the Wall currently showing in the city.
Three bodies of work meet for the first time in this show. The first is Places, Traces: a set of seven desert landscapes and a typology of 20 graves from Barmer and Bikaner. Six of the seven landscapes are lined next to each other on one wall, forming an undulating horizon, a wave of dusty silver made by the sand dunes. The bright patches of color and the overpowering heat that one is used to seeing photographed in these famously barren stretches are absent in Gill’s images. They are flat, grey and printed small (16x20 in). Going up close to the frames — almost close enough to frost the glass — one notices a human presence on the land. In one photograph: a line of rubber slippers left outside what must be a school, with five black shoes and single pair of floaters standing out from the rest, perhaps marking those six children as slightly better off. In another: a number of burial mounds, handmade with piles of stone and rubble, lie around a tree, a graveyard. In yet another: three wells lie equidistant from each other, a man walks away from one towards the edge of the frame, two women stand astride the other, and what may be a family with a donkey is around the third. Move back again from the frames and man and his marks become insignificant, threatened at every moment by the sea of grey that they inhabit. And yet they are there, persistent, surviving, seen.
The second body of work, from which the exhibition gets its name, documents drawings done on the walls of schools across rural Rajasthan under the Leher Kaksha scheme (no longer operational) whose aim was to help children learn visually. Gill collects paintings of tigers and birds, lines of letters and numbers, the sketches of school going children that have almost faded, portraits of Swami Vivekananda and Subhas Chandra Bose, a life-size human body with all its parts marked out, a map of India drawn on the blackboard, the Asoka pillar and the national flag. We recognise these symbols of our childhood classroom and are transported momentarily to the time in which we were taught to sing the national anthem and recite the alphabet. But almost immediately we become aware that this is not our classroom, the bright windows show us glimpses of the hot sun beating on the four cement walls. Everywhere are signs of stark poverty — the paint is cracking, the bricks are bare, the chart paper is torn and the globe standing on the wooden desk looks deserted, as if it belongs elsewhere.
Fields of Sight, the third series being shown, is a new set of photo-paintings produced with Warli artist Rajesh Vangad from Dahanu, on the coast of Maharashtra. The process of production here is entirely different from anything Gill has done before. It begins with landscape photographs taken by her in and around Ganjad, the
Adivasi village where Vangad lives. Vangad guides Gill to places that are significant for him and his community and he poses for her — often looking away, often pensive — in each frame. The printed photograph is then inscribed with Warli art using tones of black paint, Vangad illuminating histories, seasons and stories invisible to Gill’s eye.
Before we begin to explore how and if these new works speak to each other and to us, let us look at Gill’s journey as a photographer. Her first solo exhibition was The Americans, a series documenting South Asians living in the US. She has seen national and international success with the work she has produced in Rajasthan over 17 years, an ongoing archive she has titled Notes from the Desert. The first book from this series is Balika Mela, a collection of portraits of rural girls taken in a makeshift studio during two successive festivals for girls organised by Urmul (a well-established NGO that has been in the region for several decades). As a journalist, she has photographed widely, working with Outlook for five years. More recently, Gill published a notebook on the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, asking writers to respond to photographs that she had taken in 2005, 2009 and 2014 documenting the homes of victims and surviving family members. As an educator, she has taught children and adults, artists and amateurs, the art of making and reading images.
Knowing this history, let us turn to the question of what the exhibition says as a whole. It is most successful when looked at as an archive of what has vanished or what will vanish. Whether that is the fragile human settlements and objects seen in Places, Traces or the fertility inscribed onto the land by Vangad that reveals a time when Dahanu was abundant with plant and animal life, each season celebrated, the fields full and the air festive. Even the children’s drawings stand out as documents of innocence and beauty, of the passion for learning in an education system that is otherwise hostile and largely unproductive. In all three works, Gill makes a strong visual argument about the ability for people anywhere, in any circumstances, to make their mark on this world and to do it imaginatively. We are pushed to begin seeing unexpected forms of art from and in unexpected places.
But because Gill’s method of working has been so collaborative — she has long-lasting relationships with the families in Rajasthan, often discusses her work with them, brings them prints for their homes, she has also held photography workshops for girls there giving them cameras and film — one feels the need to ask whether this argument is enough. Viewed through the lens of 17 years of seeing a place, the exhibition seems like a beginning rather then an end. There is a desire to dive deeper into the world that Gill has inhabited. Where is the fecund bed of stories that allows her to keep on returning to the desert?
Perhaps the narrative depth and tension we are seeking would become palpable if certain images were printed larger or placed differently, or if the work from Rajasthan did not stand together with the work from Dahanu. Particularly in the series The Mark on the Wall, several drawings could stir up questions: why are the number of Muslims and Brahmins in a class counted, and then why are their numbers written so carefully inside two leaves drawn on a poster? In Rajasthan, where water and work is scarce, how does the story of the crow that drops pebble after pebble into the water pot, working hard in the hot sun so that he may drink his fill, resonate with the child drawing it onto the wall of his classroom? Even in Places, Traces, the 20 graves that have been displayed could force us to ask why each grave is unique, why so filled with personal effects when death is so commonplace? But as they lie grouped on the wall, it is difficult to imbibe their individual power.
Similarly, in the collaboration with Vangad the aesthetic decisions rarely allow the viewer to bring their own imagination into conversation with the photo-painting. Each one is beautiful for showing us a way of life, of being with the earth that few have known, and in this sense they are complete. But from the perspective of weaving our own stories, of feeling a sense of spontaneous dialogue emerging as we stand looking at the inscribed landscape – that is where we are uncertain, where we become too alien to the language on display to enter into it freely.
Gill has curated this exhibition herself over months, distilling years of work done in remote places for the urban audience, in which she wishes to connect the dots or layers between the three works. She has mastered the art of making a tightly edited visual argument; there is no photograph here that does not “fit”. But when the subject matter of each work is so rich and volatile (both Dahanu and Rajasthan have histories and politics that are complex, often violent and distressing) it becomes essential to ask whether any, or all of these works, is being neglected by the process of juxtaposition. We can only hope to see more of Gill’s work soon, perhaps outside of the pristine gallery, perhaps configured radically differently, because there is much more to be explored.
The Mark on the Wall is showing at Galerie Mirchandani and Steinruecke till June 30
Alisha Sett is a writer based in Mumbai
