Bhanwari and Lichhma

2003 - Photography (Photography)
106.68 x 160.02 cm

Bhanwari and Lichhma from the Balika Mela series by Gauri Gill explores human expression through the medium of photography, bringing questions of agency, the role of photography, and feminism together through its portraits of adolescent girls from rural Rajasthan, India. Balika Mela is an annual fair for girls aimed at uplifting a population severely maligned in Rajasthan. Having set up a stall in this fair, Gill invited local girls to voluntarily pose for photographs which they were allowed to keep, expressing their performative individuality. Gill also taught photography classes throughout the course of the fair. The photographs naturally draw questions of representation while also taking on a timeless, multi-temporal dimension, in that it was re-iterated by Gill approximately seven years after the initial photos, as she again passed through the same Rajasthani community as part of a later iteration of the series Balika Mela . The serial nature of these photographs is indicative of the fluid, incomplete process of their intended empowerment, organized against the day to day oppression faced by the girls. Bhanwari and Lichhma offers an alternative model to the singular exoticizing model of journalism-driven portraiture. Instead, the photographs visually striking ethnographic qualities bring to the surface performativity and expression as means of foregrounding agency in their representations. Consisting of striking images, full of power and outright disdain for its audience in the girls’ expressions, the series points to an important, inaccessible movement of empowerment, community building, and imagination that refuses conventional visualities of subaltern existence.

Gauri Gill is interested in the social contract of photography. Her photographs propagate expression to subaltern existences within rural Indian states, even as they critically denote a fundamental imbalance in their own existence, at once accredited to Gill as well as the cultural, social, and political statements of the collaborators that she photographs. Her practice operates on a surface level that opens up onto an ephemeral, vital set of relationships, both through and beyond her social engagement with the communities, individuals, and practices that drive her photography to hold much more than what it directly portrays. In doing so, her works inquire about the circulation of expression from the margins of contemporary life, Gill’s work forming an estuary of repressed voices that leaks outward into the discourse of the greater art world. The Western structure of the singular artist as genius disintegrates against these somewhat anonymized, though strident sources. The sense that there is an expanded, unwieldy network of individuals at play throughout her works is present in their sometimes overflowing serial quality: almost all of her series are ongoing, and overlap each other.

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