In one photograph, a couple kneels outside. The ground in front of the house is tile or hard-packed earth. The woman chops greens on a low cutting board, and the man lifts a tomato from a platter of vegetables. Her face is obscured by the black carapace of a gigantic beetle, his by an oversized insect with a long proboscis—perhaps a flea or a mosquito.
The Kokna and Warli communities in Jawhar, India, are known for their papier-mâché masks depicting Hindu and Indigenous deities. The masks are used to stage religious tableaux vivant during the yearly Bohada festival, but the figures depicted in Gauri Gill’s Acts of Appearance series instead wear masks of earthly creatures. As Hemant Sareen writes in an essay on the series to accompany Gill’s first exhibition at James Cohan, these images of Indigenous artists applying their craft to represent ordinary humans, common animals, and household objects “rearrange time to redress [the] sins of misrepresentation and exclusion” perpetuated by colonial photographers in India.
