Presented in conjunction with Looking For Ourselves: Gauri Gills The Americans, 2000-2007.
In this conversation, artist Gauri Gill joins curator Roma Patel to explore her embrace of collaborative partnership—an active relationship between subject, spectator, and photographer.
Throughout her practice, Gauri Gill has worked with her subjects in the documentation of their experiences. Documenting Adivasi people in coastal Maharashtra, farmers in Punjab, and migrants in America, Gill uses photography as a powerful tool to give a platform to those rendered voiceless by the state, media, and society. She believes in working with and within her community, using a methodology she calls “active listening.”
Gauri Gill (b.1970) is a New Delhi-based photographer. She has exhibited her work both in India and abroad. In 2022, her first major survey exhibition opened at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and traveled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk in January 2023. Gill is widely revered for her raw depiction of the lives of individuals in rural Rajasthan over the course of twenty years in Notes from the Desert, for which she was awarded the prestigious Prix Pictet award in 2023. Gill has recently published two books with Edition Patrick Frey about her collaborations with rural artists, Acts of Appearance (2022) and Fields of Sight (2023).
Roma A. Patel is a 2024 MODA Curates Fellow and curator of Looking for Ourselves: Guari Gill’s The Americans, 2000-2007. Based in New York, she is an emerging curator of modern and contemporary South Asian art. Her work engages with postcolonial and diasporic discourses, as she explores modes of seeing, collective memories and dreams, and the visibility and visuality of self in the Global South. She received her BA from Boston University, and has held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Whitney Museum, and Phillips.
MODA Curates is an annual opportunity offered by the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery and the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art, Critical and Curatorial Studies Program (MODA) for outstanding curatorial proposals related to student theses.
