Gauri Gill (b. 1970) earned a BFA (Applied Art) from the College of Art, New Delhi, BFA (Photography) from Parsons School of Design in NYC, and MFA (Art) from Stanford University in California. She has exhibited within India and internationally, including the the Kochi Biennale; Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Wiener Library, London; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University and National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Her work is in the collections of prominent North American and Indian institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt and Fotomuseum, Winterthur, and in 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography. Gill’s practice is complex because it contains several lines of pursuit. These include a now seventeen-year-long engagement with marginalised communities in rural Rajasthan—including Notes from the Desert, Jannat, Balika Mela, Birth Series and Ruined Rainbow. She has explored human displacement and the immigrant experience in series such as The Americans and What Remains. Projects such as the 1984 notebooks highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and ‘active listening’, and in using photography as a memory practice. Her most recent series, Fields of Sight, is an equal collaboration with a renowned folk artist, combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing to co-create new narratives. Working in both black and white and colour, Gill’s work addresses the twinned Indian identity markers of class and community as determinants of mobility and social behaviour. In her work, there is empathy, surprise, and a human concern over issues of survival.
