In 2019, during renovations to his home, Devashish Gaur found an old box of family photos. Many depicted his grandfather, to whom the artist is often compared. Gaur decided to use these images in a complex, ongoing series that merges past and present, sometimes literally splicing together images from different times. Combining personal and cultural history, the series reflects technological and political shifts across generations. One image is an old group photo viewed through a smartphone camera: Little yellow boxes around the men’s faces indicate that the device is attempting to recognize them. The outlines mimic Gaur’s efforts to trace his origins, while also hinting at the increasing surveillance in his hometown of Delhi, named the world’s “most surveilled city” based on the number of CCTV cameras per square mile (nearly 2,000).
Alongside these mediated images in the series are Gaur’s own straightforward blackand- white photographs. These tend toward solitary figures and still lifes that project a sense of loneliness, disconnection, even failed ambition. In one, Gaur’s father’s pillow, stained with bodily fluids, slumps against a wall. In another, a copper plaque awarded to Gaur’s grandfather for his role as a freedom fighter resisting British rule in India appears in verso; the gesture reflects the artist’s doubt as to whether his society is yet free.
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The series is a reminder of the ways in which sociopolitical shifts play out at home. Gaur said his family has become more fragmented over time; gatherings with relatives are now rare. Meanwhile, his father has become increasingly outspoken: He will often pen responses to current events on social media. Sometimes his account gets blocked. He opposed the building of a temple near their house, since for him, it reflected the Indian government’s growing embrace of religion as a divisive force. This led to conflict with neighbors. Another image from the series shows an idol Gaur’s father once worshiped now covered in dust.
“Grey Space.”
This year, Gaur has spent several months in Auroville, an Indian city formed in 1968 as an experiment in “progressive harmony” among people from many countries, whose charter says it “belongs to nobody in particular.” He has also been working on a new kind of family album. This project, “Grey Space,” comprises archival photos he finds in shops across India with an eye for photographic details—attire, gestures—that he reads as markers of class or performances of gender. It promises to be a vernacular collective history of India, one that privileges self-representation over colonial depictions of Indian communities patched together from Westerners’ snapshots. For Gaur, photographs flicker between portals and prisms, offering both insights into a life and outward observations of a society.
Source: artnews.com