Studio 3: Stuck In A Moment

A photograph does not simply suspend a moment of action – it memorialises it. We are introduced to a new vocabulary, a language that intimately probes our choices, our wants, our aspirations. Such images stagger us into a realm of the has-been, while simultaneously making us aware of what could be. In these images therefore, the artists articulate an understanding of the land we have come from, and the landscape we are excavating daily. We are in Gauri Gill’s and Bani Abidi’s The VIP’s Waiting Room (2009), a culturally absurd limbo where we await our turn to escape. Abidi’s photograph – with its lack of doors and any clear entry/exit point – leaves us in a dilemma, for how long are we to wait?

It is a conversation that Soham Gupta’s Eden Series remarks upon with historical monuments and places left asunder by industrial developments. In his documentation of weathered environments, cracked walls, and desolate spaces, we are thrust onto the path of a scarred past, an existential tension that leaves our future uncertain. It is a well of loneliness that is made obvious with Yamini Nayar’s deconstructions in her Study series (2008-09) where we brave into an apocalyptic nightmare of disarray and contortion. There is an isolation that is tense towards the developments of the present, and the arrogant remains of its now-defunct past. In this limbo, we arrive at an inflexible zero, a confluence of lines and forms that converge where Parul Gupta’s series of photographs rest; it is a composition that plays with its physical space, merging as well as standing apart with it. It is a very literal manifestation of an exciting question: where are we in all this?