City through a photographer’s lens
The first edition of this photo biennale will have exhibitions, artist talks, symposiums and workshops
NEW DELHI :
Photography deserves, needs a platform. It is the underdog in the world of art right now," says Varun Gupta, co-founder and festival director of the Chennai Photo Biennale that will be held from 26 February.
The festival, a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller and Travelling Lens, a Chennai-based photography collective, will comprise a series of exhibitions, artist talks, workshops and symposiums.
“It’s a grass-roots campaign to start awareness of photography," says Gupta, “which is why we are taking a lot of the work to public spaces."
This is not the first time public spaces in the city have come alive with photographs. A photography exhibition was held at the MRTS Station in 2012 as part of the Art Chennai Initiative; another show was organized at Elliot’s Beach in 2013. Gupta was part of both projects. However, “this is the first time a festival devoted completely to photography is being held in the city", he says.
As part of the festival, a workshop-cum-exhibition, “Urban Water", was held in January. From images of plastic fished out of water and shot in a studio to those of an intense grid of coloured water pipes, the eclectic array of images has been shot by 15 photographers, based in India and abroad, under the mentorship of Munem Wasif, Ravi Agarwal and Andreas Deffner. This will be showcased throughout the biennale at the MRTS Light House Station. “It is this massive cavernous building that has nothing inside and we are taking it over with photographs. We aren’t just looking at photographs. It is an experience that is determined by the space itself," says Gupta.
The biennale also has permission to exhibit photographs at four train stations and one public park, the Nageshwara Rao Park.
A second exhibition, Surrealistic By Nature, will be held at the Nageshwara Rao Park from 27 February. Curated by Chennai-based French photographer Yannick Cormier, this exhibition is “about tradition, about communities and how they keep this cultural identity alive in a modern world", says Cormier. “Keeping your culture alive becomes a tool of resistance. And when you see the work (which includes Denis Dailleux’s shots of a community in Ghana and Suresh Punjabi’s studio shots), you realize there is something surrealistic and poetic about it," he adds.
Selected works from the recent Delhi Photo Festival also form part of this biennale, says Gupta. “Helmut (Helmut Schippert, director of the Goethe-Institut) and I visited (Delhi) in October and we curated a selection of 25 photographers from there," he says. Photographers whose works will be showcased include Raghu Rai, Angélica Dass, Emanuele Satolli and the late Kishor Parekh.
There are also offerings from partner galleries such as Alliance Française de Madras and Spaces, Besant Nagar. Artist Talks, where photographers will take you through their journeys and speak about their current projects, will include names like Dailleux, Philip Blenkinsop, Walter Astrada and Pablo Bartholomew. “Almost everyone on this list is a World Press Photo winner," says Gupta.
The organizers admit that permission to exhibit in public spaces is hard to get. “The civil society is not the problem, the bureaucracy is," says Schippert, adding that he has spent long hours in public offices to get permissions. Yet it was worth it, he says: “We need public spaces for art because there aren’t enough spaces for art anyway, and only if you do things in a public space will you connect with ordinary people who never normally enter a gallery."
The Chennai Photo Biennale will be held from 26 February-13 March. Timings and venues vary. For details, visit Chennaiphotobiennale.com.
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