In Person: Unsealed Chamber with Sukanya Baskar
For the sixth episode of In Person we speak with Sukanya Baskar about Unsealed Chamber: The Transient Image, recently on view at Galerie Romain Rolland, Alliance Française, Delhi. Curated by Rahaab Allana, the exhibition included the works of four artists who have engaged with alternative image-making practices over prolonged periods of time—Aparna Nori, Arpan Mukherjee, Indu Antony and Philippe Calia. Baskar, who has done the scenography for the show, takes us through the exhibition and speaks about the curatorial framework and ideas that bring the works of these four artists together. Working with different kinds of alternative printing processes to bring out the personal through their works, the four artists and their practices “…offer excavations of interiority, fresh issues of awareness and explorations of deep memory/deep time,” Allana writes in the curatorial note for the show.
Arpan Mukherjee, who runs a studio for research on nineteenth-century photography in Santiniketan, works with various photographic printing processes to address various cotemporary socio-economic and political issues. Mukherjee’s works in this show deal with a personal story of migration as he explores the relationship between photography and time. Aparna Nori and Indu Antony are part of Kānike—a collective of diverse practitioners who incorporate time-tested, organic and handcrafted processes into their work. In her series Nalla Pilla, Nori uses analogue methods like salted paper prints as well as a digital projection of a performance to record details of her body, its shades and textures. Antony also uses salted paper prints—a medium which fades over time—to explore the photographic meaning of visibility and invisibility in her work. Philippe Calia works with debris found at the edge of the archive and integrates them into his own production via collage and montage techniques. Calia contrasts his reproductions of smooth aerial sights of extractive commercial mining sites with a video installation composed of images from his personal archive.
Sukanya Baskar is a curator, writer and researcher. Her work has developed closely alongside archives, with a focus on photography and the moving image. Her interest in print and publication has led her to look at historical and contemporary artist publishing practices as well as photo publications. She is currently working on researching a history of photography and the magazine in India from the 1940s to the 1970s.
(Featured Image: Installation view of Unsealed Chamber: The Transient Image. New Delhi, 2021. Photograph by Srinivas Kuruganti.)
Live streamed on 03 Nov 2021.
To read more about the Kānike Collective, please click here.
To read more about Arpan Mukherjee, please click here.
In case you missed the previous episodes of In Person, you can catch the most recent ones here, here and here.
