“Projects 108: Gauri Gill” Exhibition

MOMA PS1

poster for “Projects 108: Gauri Gill” Exhibition

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MoMA PS1 presents the US premiere of photographer Gauri Gill’s (Indian, born 1970) most recent body of work, Acts of Appearance. Working closely with members of an Adivasi community in Jawhar district, Maharashtra, India, Gill created a series of vivid color photographs that foreground the community’s renowned production of papier-mâché objects, including traditional sacred masks. Projects 108: Gauri Gill, featuring Acts of Appearance alongside work from Gill’s series Notes from the Desert.

While traveling in Maharashtra, Gill heard about the Bahoda festival, a ritual celebration of performance and dance observed by members of the Kokna tribe. Over several nights, members of the community enact well-known Hindu epics intermingled with tribal myths, performed with the aid of papier-mâché masks that depict Hindu gods, local tribal gods and demons, and other characters. After seeing the masks, and reflecting upon the possible distance between these traditions and the everyday realities of the Jawhar community, Gill commissioned community members to create a new set of masks that, instead of depicting gods and deities, would take the form of familiar people and animals or valued objects. Many of the masks incorporate common aspects of human existence such as various life stages, states of health, and emotions (or rasas).

Trained as a painter and applied artist, Gill (b. 1970, Chandigarh, India) received a BFA from the Delhi College of Art, and then turned to photography as her primary medium, earning a second BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York and an MFA from Stanford University. In 2011, Gill received the Grange Prize (now known as the Aimia/AGO Photography prize). Her work has been presented internationally and in India, including at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, the 7th Moscow Biennale, Prospect 4 in New Orleans, and Kochi Biennale, as well as at institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Art Gallery of Ontario; the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi; and the Whitechapel Gallery, London; among others. She lives in New Delhi.

Organized by Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Media

Schedule

from April 15, 2018 to September 03, 2018

Artist(s)

Gauri Gill

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