Photographs from South Asia

Name: Photographs from South Asia
Item: Kamloops Art Gallery
Author: Lorna Tureski

by Lorna Tureski

January 29, 2018

11:30 AM

Alexander Gorlizki and Riyaz Uddin Studio, “Quorum,” 2008

opaque watercolour and gold on inkjet digital print, 12” x 11” (on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. This acquisition was made possible with the generous support of the South Asia Acquisition and Research Fund. Image used with permission of the Royal Ontario Museum ©ROM)

“Resist superficial readings of the photographs,” cautions Adrienne Fast, interim curator of the Kamloops Art Gallery, as she leads visitors through Re Present: Photography of South Asia, on view until March 31.

Photography in the 19th and early 20th centuries developed along two parallel paths in India. On one, the British colonial government used it to create propaganda and to catalogue various groups and castes. An innocuous-looking photo of Mount Everest by British government photographer Samuel Bourne, taken in the late 1800s, required dozens of porters to haul masses of equipment over difficult terrain. “Think about the social dance, the structures of power that were in place to make this photo,” Fast says.

The other path was enthusiastically taken by a wide spectrum of social classes and castes. Photo studios became social spaces where people who wouldn’t normally mingle came together, donned costumes and performed in front of the camera. Techniques of over-painting created striking, hyper-realistic images.

Part of the exhibition features contemporary South Asian and Indo-Canadian artists who work with archival photos, updating and changing them, inserting the present into the past, confounding memory and encouraging viewers to question the validity of photographic records.

1 of 3

Vivan Sundaram, “Doppelganger,” from the series “Re-Take of Amrita,” 2001

archival digital pigment print, 15” x 28” (courtesy of the artist and sepiaEYE)

2 of 3

Unknown photographer, “Portrait of a Ceylonese Girl with Umbrella,” circa 1860-1900

albumin silver print, 10” x 8” (collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1972)

3 of 3

Ghasiram Haradev Sharma, “Portrait of Bhadariji Devarajaji,” 1890s

watercolour and gold on albumin silver print (on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada. This acquisition was made possible with the generous support of the South Asia Research and Acquisition Fund. Image used with permission of the Royal Ontario Museum ©ROM)

The depth and breadth of Re Present, both in the number of works and the complexity of the issues it interrogates – colonialism, racism, migration and immigration, to name a few – demands much of viewers committed to looking deeply. I rest on a bench and watch a video by the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective loop over and over. The subtle movements layered onto an archival photo bloom across the screen and for a moment I let my mind rest. It’s a lot to take in. ■