Nature Morte is pleased to launch Gauri Gill’s “BalikaMela,” published by Edition Patrick Frey of Zurich, Switzerland. With 72 black-and-white plates and 32 color reproductions, essays by Gill herself and Manju Saran (in English and Hindi), the book is a sumptuous document of Gill’s photo studio set up to take portraits of the predominantly female children and adolescents that attended the fair in remote and rural western Rajasthan. In 2003 and again in 2010, Gill collaborated with her subjects to produce these self-conscious portraits, on occasions also conducting technical workshops on photography and displaying some of the images taken in Lunkaransar previously. The book will be released at the gallery on the evening of September 15th and copies will be available for sale at the special price of Rs 1500. On display will be a selection of images from the book in large-scale prints, as well as the series “Jannat”.

The critic and curator GayatriSinha has written this on the works:

“Gill’s photo document “BalikaMela (2003/10”) embodies India’s staggered engagement with modernity. What began with Ram Singh’s foto ka karkhana in the 1850s comes to Lunkaransar, 300 km from Jaipur, over 150 years later. For the young girls posing in the makeshift tent studio set up by Gill, the moment of improvisation becomes a performative gestalt. The girls perform gender, cross gender, divines, Bollywood, and just themselves, with an interested gaze at the camera. Technology enables mimicry that traverses class. The 19th century grand studio portrait of heavy velvet drapes and aristocratic subjects is here imitated with a stubborn confidence that exceeds the poverty of materials. Gill as a (woman) photographer lends agency, the freedom to perform, the return of the gaze, the playful mis-en-scene, not unlike the freedom for self representation afforded by the woman photographer in zenana studios a hundred years ago."