Photographs inspired by a child’s drawings

PANAJI: Walking past a few rooms in the Adil Shah Palace here, a venue for the ongoing Serendipity Arts Festival, a corner wall catches the eye.
It’s not because the work displayed on it is strikingly beautiful but because of the oddity of the pairings – leaves from what looks like a child’s drawing book are showcased alongside their almost photographic replicas.
A closer look reveals a story, and that is strikingly beautiful.

During his time shooting at a hospital in Jaipur, Delhi-based artist Chandan Gomes chanced upon a drawing book and decided to embark on a journey to locate the author.
As one thing led to another, he discovered that the book belonged to a little girl from Baran in Rajasthan. But Aini Haseena Bano had passed away last January, even before Gomes found her book.
The work titled, “This World of Dew” that he created over a span of five years (2011-2015) offered him what he calls “closure”.
“The drawings revealed little…the answers I was seeking lay outside those pages. I left for the mountains with the book. For the next eight months I travelled extensively, making photographs inspired by the child’s drawings,” the artist writes in the beautifully articulated wall-text beside the work.

Gomes’ work is being showcased at the annual arts festival as part of an exhibition, “Intimate Documents”, curated by renowned photographer Ravi Agarwal.
“This show attempts to carve out what constitutes a photography practice today, and we see practice after practice, photographer after photographer, turning the camera to very personal spaces and putting them out in public,” Agarwal said during an impromptu walk-through of the show.
He has often “seen the camera turn closer to home”, he added.
Also part of the exhibition is another work by Gomes – “There are things I call Home” that features photographs of the artist’s domicile, while giving the viewer an idea of what constitutes it.
For Gomes, home is an unkempt pile of books, a lazily wrapped joystick, a shelved violin case, and passport-sized photographs stuck on a dilapidated iron almirah.
“I feel these photographs reveal a lot – about him, where he lives, what he finds important and about his relationship with different kinds of things and ways of being,” Agarwal said.
Another extremely personal work in this segment is Sohrab Hura’s “Life is Elsewhere”. Hura, who is also based in Delhi, chronicles his mother’s battle with schizophrenia, among other aspects of his life, in a series of photographs.

The monochromatic pictures are displayed in packs and presented in the form of what looks like a diary, with instructions like “page-fold” as the viewer shifts from one wall to another in the room.
Annotated in corners, sometimes with an arrow mark, at other times with an asterisk, the work is confessional, almost baring the soul of the artist, making him vulnerable.
“The question we want to ask (through the show) is why are these works emerging as practices. It’s a question I cannot answer easily, without the showing of it,” Agarwal said.
Other artists exhibited in the show include Anoop Ray, Avani Tanya, Indu Antony, Natalie Soysa & Sachini Perera, Amna Iqbal, and Chinar Shah. PTI