Mapping Photographs of Indian Domestic Space – Curatorial Fellowship notes by Megha Sehdev
House of Love by Dayanita Singh, 2011, Radius Books.
The “turn to domesticity” in visual and installation art has been reflected in the last decade of transnational Indian art photography. Following a long history of portrait and studio genres, Indian photographers are now using documentary techniques to produce a vision of space that is otherwise hidden from view, creating a distinct aesthetic of the everyday. At the same time, documentary genres carry the risk of normalizing the gaze, and of reproducing ideologies of home life. In my curatorial work I am interested in mapping contemporary photographs of Indian domestic space, both from the subcontinent and abroad. Using curatorial methods, my hope is to show how contemporary photographs continue or depart from a history of conversations on the aesthetics of the postcolonial “Indian home”.
I arrived at this project through a long process that is still in formation. Initially I intended to explore photographs for their depiction of women’s roles and activities in home spaces. I was interested in photography as a powerful tool for envisioning the possibilities of women’s domestic lives. The project was intended as a counterpoint to my PhD work on domestic violence and sought a creative reimagining of gendered space. I discovered however that photographs are not so easily read and interpreted. While some photos reveal subjects absorbed in a transformative space (Barthes’s “punctum”), the photos cannot be freed from discourses of sexual and kin norms, or from the political economy of representation (the “studium”). As a result my project has shifted to a finer analysis of influences, techniques, and tensions in the longer history of Indian photography and of broader aesthetic debates surrounding the home. I am interested in the specificity of photography and what it may add to longstanding discussions of the “private” extruding into the “public”, as a reflection of particular tastes, moralities, and politics. At the same time, I wish to retain my earlier focus on photographs that “prick”, or disturb the expected terrain of representation, creating a chance to imagine domestic life anew. My hope is that this project will illuminate some challenges I face in my PhD work in defining the elusive space of the domestic, and its shifting significance in women’s lives.
To this end I have started to assemble an online archive of images. With the support of Lex Milton at the CEREV lab, I am creating a website to display and describe selected photographs. The website provides an interface with both archiving and curating functions, in order to re-arrange the works into small, virtual exhibits. My long-term intention is to devise a shifting, experimental frame in which photographs (and eventually other forms of visual material) can be juxtaposed and emplotted within academic and curatorial descriptions.
Post by Megha Sehdev
