SOLO SHOW
Vicky Roy
This Scarred Land: New Mountainscapes
December 2- December 31, 2017
Vadehra Art Gallery, D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024
11 am – 7 pm (Monday to Saturday)
Vadehra Art Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of artist Vicky Roy’s photographic series documenting the topographical contours of the mountains in Himachal Pradesh as they have been transformed by industrial interventions. Curated by photographer Ram Rahman, the series, titled ‘This Scarred Land: New Mountainscapes’, reflects the changing landscape of the Himalayas by capturing its formative changes. Traditionally revered as dev-bhumi (‘land of the lord’), the Himalayas have carried a sacred connotation and the photographs in question intend to capture the interruption of this normative perception of the mountains by showing how the interface between man and machine has ‘scarred’ the mysticism characteristic of the region.
Unsentimental in approach, the monochromatic photographs subvert the tropes of landscape photography by capturing the Himalayas not through staple angles, but through the terrifying beauty of the depleting natural resources of the region. A revision on 19th century photographer Samuel Bourne’s pristine portraits of the Himalayas, Roy’s photographs veer towards a representation of contemporary India, capturing its rush to development as it is industrially envisioned. The images capture the losing battle between the trees, rocks, rivers and other constitutive elements of the landscape with industrial invasion through the intervention of another powerful technology- the still camera.
Originally from West Bengal, Vicky Roy fled his native home as a child and started working as a rag-picker at the New Delhi Railway Station, before being rehabilitated by the Salaam Baalak Trust, Delhi. He studied photography at Triveni Kala Sangam and then apprenticed under portrait photographer Anay Mann. In 2007, he held his first solo exhibition titled, “Street Dream” at the India Habitat Centre, supported by the British High Commission. In 2008, he was selected by the US based Maybach Foundation to photo-document the reconstruction of the World Trade Center in New York where he simultaneously undertook a course in documentary photography at the International Center for Photography, New York. His first monograph ‘Home Street Home’, published by the Nazar Foundation, was released at the second edition of the Delhi Photo Festival (Sept-Oct, 2013). He was also awarded the MIT Media Fellowship in 2014.
For more information regarding the exhibition, please write to us at ritika@vadehraart.com or call us at +91 11 46103550/ 46103551/ 65474005