PHOTO LONDON 2021
Tenzing Dakpa, Srinivas Kuruganti & Spandita Malik
8 September - Preview
9 - 12 September 2021
For Photo London 2021, indigo+madder will bring together works by Tenzing Dakpa, Srinivas Kuruganti and Spandita Malik. In a variety of different ways, all three artists address notions of identity, memory and community in their work.
Tenzing Dakpa is a Tibetan-Indian photographer whose practice explores concepts related to the home, migration, diasporic communities, and transnational spaces. His series Ari, which means America in Tibetan, brings together images from the US (Queens, Cambridge and Providence) and India (Sikkim and Goa), taken between 2014-2020. The series investigates the complexity of the ‘American dream’, which is usually equated to a level of financial stability and security when contrasted with precarious conditions back ‘home’, and is one of the many drivers of migration. However, as the pandemic has exposed, many smaller marginalised diasporic communities still have a precarious lived reality that contrasts with this aspirational narrative. Dakpa’s images take a nuanced look at these realities, alluding to the labour and sacrifice inherent in the diasporic sphere. They explore connections to a homeland – whether real or imagined, and acculturation within diasporas. The series also provides glimpses of translocality that emerge, such as in Queens, where a significant Tibetan-Nepalese community resides, and exposes spaces of hope, connection, and mutual support. The series maps Dakpa’s own journey to the US and eventual move to Goa, while exploring societal and familial expectations often attached to migration. We encounter images of a cabinet full of crockery in Dakpa’s childhood home in Sikkim, a tray of eggs positioned precariously near a truck’s wheels, a cash register at a store in Queens- the series is tinged with humour, full of moments of connection, tension, a longing for home and a desire to create a space of one’s own.
Srinivas Kuruganti’s series Pictures in my hand of a boy I still resemble and Bhangra New York City were shot in California and New York in the 80’s and 90’s. Kuruganti spent his teenage years in Delhi before moving to California in 1986, to study. With the move, came a complete sense of displacement and culture shock. Kuruganti began photographing extensively, as that was something that felt familiar, helped assuage feelings of dislocation and enabled him to engage with the new world he now inhabited. Charged with emotion, these series of images document the lives of first- and second-generation diasporic communities during that time period and convey a strong sense of time and place. Pictures in my hand of a boy I still resemble (1986-91) explores notions of identity and self-discovery through poignant portraits of friends and acquaintances involved in creating their own spaces and taking comfort in each other’s company. Kuruganti’s Bhangra New York City series captures the developing South Asian party scene in NYC in the early 90s that was based on Bhangra music, and had emerged earlier in the United Kingdom. The images capture a time when alongside rising political organising, a vibrant diasporic New York club scene was evolving, which functioned as a space for resistance and community building in South Asian diasporic communities. These clubs also became safe spaces for South Asian LGBTQIA+ communities. The two series bring together an incredible archive of images that capture the struggle for belonging, social interaction and identity formation in young people from the South Asian diaspora in the late twentieth century.
Spandita Malik is a New York-based artist from India, whose work often addresses women’s rights and gender-based violence. Her ongoing project, Nā́rī, features embroidered photographic portraits made in collaboration with women in India. These works were developed over time, through an incredibly layered, participative process. She travelled to several regions in India, known for their traditional embroidery styles and distinctively woven fabrics, to interview women in self-help embroidery groups for sexual assault and domestic violence survivors. Through recommendations, she also began meeting many women such as Sindhu, Kirna Devi, Poonam and others, who were either not allowed or did not feel safe enough to come out to the centres, but would embroider in their domestic spaces. Malik embarked on a project to interview and document their stories, and photograph them in spaces within which they felt most comfortable. She eventually printed these images on traditional fabric and invited the group to manipulate and embroider the surfaces. The resulting works are rich, layered tapestries, each unique to the personality of its embroiderer and testament to the networks and friendships formed in these spaces. They harness the rich tradition of using embroidery as a form of resistance, self-expression, means of communication and finding community. These collaborations have a layering of diverse positionalities, break down distinctions between art and craft, and explore ideas related to identity and agency.
Download Catalogue - Tenzing Dakpa | Srinivas Kuruganti| Spandita Malik
Tenzing Dakpa (b. 1985, India) lives and works between Goa and New Delhi. He received his BFA in Graphic Design from the College of Art, University of Delhi in 2009 and MFA Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. He was the recipient of a RISD fellowship between 2014-2016 and the T.C. Colley Scholarship for Excellence in Photography in 2015. Dakpa's book The Hotel was published by Steidl in April 2020. Dakpa's work is also included in the book Photography and Tibet by Clare Harris, which is the first historical survey of photography in Tibet and the Himalayas. In 2016, he was an artist in residence at the Center for Photography, Woodstock, NY. In 2018, The Hotel was shortlisted for the Mack First Book Award and won the Photobook Award at the Singapore International Photography Festival. Dakpa’s works have been exhibited at various art galleries and institutions including The Hotel: Don-Khang, Singapore International Photography Festival, 2021; The Hotel, indigo+madder, London 2019; Asia House, London in 2018; FotoFest Houston Biennial, Asia Society Texas Center (Texas) in 2018; Lamar Dodd School of Art, Athens, Georgia in 2016; Sol Koffler Gallery, Rhode Island in 2015; Woods Gerry Gallery (Rhode Island) in 2014; World Event Young Artists festival (Nottingham) and The Art Loft (Mumbai) in 2012.
Srinivas Kuruganti (b. 1967, USA) lives and works in New Delhi. He has lived in New York and London. His work tackles environmental and health issues, as well as personal essays. Between 2013 and 2017, he was the photo editor at The Caravan magazine, India’s foremost magazine for long-form journalism, on politics and culture. Since then, he has worked on archiving his photographs of three decades, which document his life and travels in India, America and Europe. He plans to develop photo books rooted in his archives. Selected exhibitions include Vantage Point Sharjah 8, Group Show, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, 2020; Turbine Bagh, Illustrations on paper bags for Sophia Karim project, London, England, 2020; Phobia, Short film on Homophobia 1990, Bangalore Queer Film Festival, Bangalore, India, 2020; Cognitive Ignorance, India Art Fair, Group Show, New Delhi, India, 2020; Ten Million Incidents, Installation/ Exhibition/ Performance Goethe Institute, New Delhi, India, 2020. His work has been published extensively, selected projects include Pictures in My Hand of a Boy I Still Resemble, series of photographs from California 1980’s, PIX Quarterly, New Delhi, India; Photo essay, Bhangra series, Nang Magazine, Sweden; Photo essay, New York, Indian Quarterly, India; Photo essay, The Last Sail: Ship-breakers of Darukhana, IIC Quarterly, India; Photography Now, Art India Magazine, India.
Spandita Malik (b. 1995, India) is a New York-based artist from India. She received her MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design, where she was awarded the Dean’s Merit Scholarship, Photography Programmatic Scholarship and Graduate Travel Grant Award. Malik was recently awarded the Firecracker Photographic Grant and South Asian Arts Resiliency Grant. She was chosen for Studio Vortex Artist Residency by Antoine d'Agata in Arles, France (2018); Baxter St Workspace Residency in New York (2020); Feminist Incubator Residency by Project for Empty Spaces in New Jersey (2020); and The Center for Photography at Woodstock Artist in Residency Program, Woodstock, NY (2021). She is also selected for The New York Times Portfolio Review and NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program for Visual & Multidisciplinary Artists. Malik’s work has been featured in magazines like Musée Magazine and Harper’s Magazine, she was named ‘Ones to Watch 2020’ by British Journal of Photography. Malik has forthcoming solo shows in 2021 at Visual Art Centre of New Jersey, New Jersey and Baxter St, New York. Her work has been featured internationally in China, France, India, Italy, New York and New Zealand.