If you are a lover of the arts, there is no better time to be in Chennai. As the all-encompassing ode to classical arts — the Margazhi season — came to an end , contemporary arts started taking over white cubes, museums campuses, shopping malls, and (soon) MRT stations in the city, much to the small but steadily growing art community’s delight.
Today, Chennai has the option to gallery-hop through the day, and savour bites pleasing to the eye and mind, from across the country and even the world. We pick five shows, part of Chennai Photo Biennale, that are currently on in the city that could be worth your time:
The Sunil Gupta retrospective, Love and Light:
From Exiles: India Gate
| Photo Credit:
Sunil Gupta
The mighty trees at the Egmore museum campus today are not only witness to lazy readers, picnicking families, and students stooping into books, but also huge portraits and smaller narrative frames that make one pause and ponder, and sometimes gasp. Veteran photographer Sunil Gupta, through his life’s work, explores how the camera shaped his identity as a gay man in the 1970s. Frames snaking through the open premises near the iconic Museum Theatre, and lodged on the steps of the Open Air Theatre document his friends, lovers, family, and significant life events. From his time in Montreal, where he was an active part of the gay liberation movement, his move to New York and London, and to India in the ‘80s where he documented people who lived secret lives, and his battle with HIV/AIDS in the ‘90s, all make way into this rather vast display.
While you are at the Museum premises, walk by the National Art Gallery, to catch What Makes Me Click, a compendium of photographs clicked by children from around the world laid out like a play area replete with poles to hang from, curated by Children’s Photography Archive in UK, and CPB.
@Government Museum, Egmore. On till March 16.
An Enduring Legacy: Lalit Mohan Sen:
From LM Sen’s archives
| Photo Credit:
special arrangement
For veteran artist and printmaker Lalit Mohan Sen (1898-1954), photography was not more than a hobby. He largely considered it a leisure sport, by experimenting with analogue photography during his extensive travels across the country, armed with a sketchbook and a camera. Today at Alliance Francaise of Madras’ Espace24 gallery, everything from rippling waters and clouded skies, delightful and defiant frames of women caught mid-laugh or mid-puff, and portraits of indigenous people and places mostly from the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand, all make for a great show of the depth of his artistic practice on film. The never-seen-before photographs on this display are from the last decade of his life, but the archive runs as far back with a photograph dating to 1922 taken in Kashmir. The show is a collection acquired from the artist’s nephew by Kolkata–based Emami Art.
@Espace24 Gallery, Alliance Francaise of Madras, On till February 15.
For the love of…:
From Cop Shiva’s series, My Mother and her Technicoloured Saris
| Photo Credit:
special arrangement
A cascade of loose silver hair, gently caressed by a passing gust of wind. The fluttering pallu of a bright purple sari with a life of its own. Homes and walls that seem familiar, that carry stories of a childhood, sometimes deprived. In ṭhis series of exceptional photographs by artist Cop Shiva, a mother’s vibrant sari collection becomes a celebration of her desires, and sometimes an act of avenging a life spent devoid of small joys. Juxtaposed alongside these frames stand South Korean photographer Lim Si Sook’s series Chaekgado, still life photographs of ‘books and things’ that adorn bookshelves that fascinated him through his extensive travels. He believes that an individual’s bookshelf is a mirror to their personality. South Korean author and recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature Han Kang’s book shelf is one of them, as are many libraries from schools, adorned with glittering trophies and medals, apart from books. Though both the bodies of work are starkly complementary to each other, they meet at being an exploration of identity and how it ties to material possessions or the absence of it.
@Gallery, InKo Centre. On till February 22.
It’s Time. To See. To Be Seen
Farheen Fatima’s series titled Meet Me in the Garden
| Photo Credit:
Special arrangement
A gallery characterised by the much-needed female gaze. At Lalit Kala Akademi’s newly renovated first floor gallery women artists from around the world bare the need for a perspective that is still lacking in a visual medium like photography. In these powerful, quirky and unapologetic frames, women are simply responding to the world through the medium of photography. Take Bhumika Saraswati’s Unequal Heat that documents how Dalit and Adivasi women remain underrepresented in climate discourse despite being crucial to our food systems or Palestinian photographer Samar Hazboun’s Ahel Al-Ard that explores the deep-rooted relationship that Palestinians have with their land, through subtle yet artistic imagery, the projects ask difficult questions, and offer hope for more representation.
@First Floor, Lalit Kala Akademi, Egmore. On till March 16.
Published – February 06, 2025 03:43 pm IST
