Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018
I started using the camera as an additional instrument to capture moments midway through my painterly journey. Over the last sixteen years, I have created a substantial repository of images featuring artists and those who cross paths with them. The gallerist, curator and the collector, have all been captured in the ongoing self-funded project of almost 16 years, ‘Artist through the lens”.
What started rather organically as a labour of love has now become a vast, visual archive of the contemporary art scene of India captured by an insider who effortlessly turns into a ‘fly on the wall’.
Born to parents of pre-partition India, my childhood was embellished with stories of their ‘home away from home’. On the terrain of my heart, Pakistan is an island, an abode of my forefathers, floating away on the tears of partition
It was no surprise then that I had nursed the desire to start the Pakistan leg of ‘Artist through the lens’. I have been photographing the Pakistani artists now since 2015. Out of these two parallel projects was born ‘Postcards from Home’.
My project ‘Postcards from Home’, traverses the borders and brings’ home’ the artist photographed. 47 postcards (the year of India’s partition) form a set each with 25 Indian and 22 Pakistani artists, all photographed by me in their creative spaces over the last few years.
The artists in the postcards have a history with partition personally or through family. The postcards carry a brief text from the artist narrating a memory about what tugs at their heart as they or their kin reminisce the ‘home lost.
.The intent is to invite the viewer to these visual frames of nostalgia, to touch a cord and revive the shared connection of a common history.
