Gauri Gill has always managed to accurately depict the realities of our time, and also raise questions about it, especially through her photographs of individuals and communities. The 48-year-old contemporary photographer still challenges established norms like she did in high school, when she defied her art teacher and created an abstract painted installation instead of a required figurative portrait.
The urge to uproot convention is apparent in her latest project, too. It was in 2013 that Gill first started to work in rural Maharashtra — she spent time in Dahanu, at Warli artist Rajesh Vangad’s home, to create work in and for the local primary school. She learnt about the sacred Bahora masks — brightly painted and lacquered — produced by papier-mâché artists across Maharashtra, and the annual procession where Adivasi villagers don them to tell tales from mythology and folklore. Almost a year later, she approached a community in Jawhar district, asking them to deviate from classical representations to create masks that depict contemporary realities. “I wondered if we could work together to speak about the present moment, what was around us, rather than a mythological, imagined past,” says the Delhi-based photographer.
