Glass Eye Episode 3: Active Listening with Gauri Gill
In Episode 3, we meet the eminent photographer Gauri Gill, recent winner of the prestigious Prix Pictet. We also meet Rajesh Chaitya Vangad, renowned Warli artist & Gauri's collaborator on the body of work Fields of Sight , which is shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize prize 2024. Touching upon two recent publications with Patrick Frey, Gauri opens up to Adira about her life's work and process, thinking through collaboration, representation and what she calls active listening.
Translations:
Excerpt 02: 14:14 - 15:42
Before anyone else, my parents were like gurus to me; you might say even beyond that. Later on, I learned from Jivya Somha Mashe, a Padma Shri award winning local artist who has done a lot of work for the Warli artfrom and presented it across the world. So I joined him. We had no money in those days, I couldn’t afford to go to school. My parents were poor and I had to abandon the traditional Warli way of life to go work for a company outside, which was a very difficult decision for me to make. I depict some of those experiences in my paintings and in this way connect our communal life with my lived experiences. My paintings feature traditional motifs as well as new ones like the company, trains, planes, the city and pollution; this is how we have evolved the art form. We want to say that we are not against education or progress but given the world’s present condition, humans need to understand the issues we are grappling with and seek out the right solutions. We try to address this through our artform.
Excerpt 03: 17:15 - 17:39
(referring to one of his paintings) You can see the fire god, the flies and the butterflies which are all very important to the Warli way of life. Without the animals we share our spaces with, our way of life is impossible. Here you see the peacock and Hirva, one of our gods that lives in the Kuldev (shrine). In this painting that depicts our communal life, it’s written that there is no distinction between us and them - all the animals are sacred.
Excerpt 04: 18:27 - 18:55
We (Gauri and I) traced my personal stories, the stories of my parents, the stories of the village school, stories of moneylenders here, stories of battles, stories from the company I worked for. We went and saw the temple here, the jungle here - the deforestation that’s taking place. We revisited all of these relevant locations in the village, took pictures and did many tests before I started to paint over them.
Excerpt 05: 23:40 - 24:25
It was very difficult to paint over the photographs - If I drew a line with ink, it would sometimes create a tear. I had to be very careful when creating the works - each line was final, we did not redraw or modify a line. Each line had to be painted directly with a stick (I didn’t have a brush). It was hard to manage all these aspects in the beginning - drawing the line, thinking about it & keeping my patience - but with time, it started to feel more natural.
Hosted by
Adira Thekkuveettil - https://www.adirathekkuveettil.com
Akshay Mahajan - https://akshaymahajan.in
Kaamna Patel - https://kaamna.com
Supported by PhotoSouthAsia and Art South Asia Project
Produced by Editions JOJO
Special thanks to Dayanita Singh
This podcast is meant to serve as an educational resource and all the recordings used in the episodes are for the purpose of supporting the research.
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