Gauri Gill
The Americans
February 16 - March 8, 2008
Kolkata
BOSE PACIA KOLKATA
Stephen's Court, 18 Park Street, Kolkata 700 071
Tel: (033)4001-0148 / bosepaciakolkata@gmail.com
Gauri Gill: "The Americans"
February 16 – March 8
Opening Saturday, February 16, 2008 from 6 - 8 pm.
Exhibition continues to March 8.
Gallery Hours 11 am - 7 pm. Closed Mondays.
Bose Pacia Kolkata is proud to present the premiere exhibition of Gauri Gill's photo-documentary project "The Americans." Shot across the United States from 2000 to 2007, Gill's project documents the Indian diaspora as it has settled across the country in rural areas, small towns and big cities, both retaining its traditional signifiers of Indian identity and merging within a larger American plurality. The resulting color photographs are simultaneously humorous, poignant, ironic, and beguiling. Gill's portrayal of her subjects and their lives emerges through her strict attention to detail and sympathetic juxtapositions.
From the forthcoming catalog essay by critic and curator Gayatri Sinha:
"Nearly five decades after [American photographer] Robert Frank, Gauri Gill takes a series of solitary journeys through America traveling extensively from New York and New Jersey to California to the Midwest and five Southern states. She moves outward, from the nucleus of family and friends to their networks, through a map lined with the material and psychological presence of migrants. The resultant body of photographs. "The Americans," emerges as a palimpsest that pays homage to Frank as much as it documents the new Americans – Indian immigrants. That Gill addresses her subjects with the transnational gaze of the traveling photographer brings her subject within the potent discourse of migration and diaspora, post-coloniality and the new world. Set in the chromatic intimacy of the candid photograph, it is inscribed by the material residue of two cultures, of the glittering flecks of Bollywood and Hollywood, the Indian and the American dream."
The exhibition will travel to Nature Morte Annexe, New Delhi, March 2008; Chatterjee and Lal Gallery, Mumbai, April 2008; Thomas Welton Art Gallery, Stanford University, July 2008; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, October 2008; Bose Pacia New York, January 2009.
Gauri Gill was born in Chandigarh in 1970. She received her first BFA degree (1992) from Delhi College of Art and her second BFA (1994) from Parsons School of Design in New York. In 2002 she received an MFA in Photography from Stanford University in California. Her works have been exhibited in New Delhi at the Vadhera, Espace and Anant Art Galleries and the India International Centre. Most recently, in 2007 her photographs were included in group exhibitions at the both the Musee Quai Branly in Paris and the Newark Museum in New Jersey. Gauri Gill lives and works in New Delhi.