Sunil Gupta and Fiona Anderson will discuss two of the artist’s photographic series,ExilesandMr Malhotra’s Party,in relation to the MA Curating exhibitionUnquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday.
In 1986, Sunil Gupta was commissioned by the Photographer’s Gallery to document the lives of gay men in Delhi.The resulting photographs, which feature a group of anonymous volunteers, provide visual evidence of private moments of love and friendship that typically went undocumented.Exileshas been described by Gupta as ‘staged documentary’, originating from an activist imperative to create images of a community he felt ‘just didn’t seem to exist’ within cultural production. When Guptareturnedto India in 2007, he found the younger generation more willing to identify themselves. InMr Malhotra’s Party, namedindividuals werephotographed in spaces they live and work in,inscribing their presenceas within the city’s social scene and family structures.
This artist’s talk will place these two series in dialogue, exploring the continuities and differencesbetween both bodies of work. Gupta and Anderson willdiscussthe activist impulse behind both series, Gupta’s photographic process, and the reception of these images in relation to mainstream coverage of queer communities in India. This talk is part of a series of events programmed aroundUnquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday,an onlineexhibition ofimages and objects that capture the small wonders and disappointments, the intimate joys and tragedies, that shape our lives. As diaries of personal experience, portraits of families and communities, or traces of loss, these works of art call us to reflect upon the many ways in which we construct archives of our lives and memories.’
Sunil Guptais a Canadian citizen, (b. New Delhi 1953) MA (Royal College of Art) PhD (University of Westminster) who has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice for many yearsfocusing on race, migration and queer issues. His recent show (withCharanSingh), “Dissent andDesire“ wasat the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston andٳ Kochi–MuzirisBiennale, Kochi, India 2018 and hislatest book is “Christopher Street 1976”, Stanley Barker 2018. His work has been seen in many importantgroupshowsincluding “Paris, Bombay, Delhi…” at the Pompidou Centre, Paris 2011 and “Masculinities” at Barbican, London. His retrospective takes place at The Photographers’ Gallery London (2020) and Ryerson ImageCeter(Toronto) 2021. He is a Professorial Fellow at UCA,Farnham, and Visiting Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. He was Lead Curator for the HoustonFotofest2018. His work is in many private and public collectionsincluding;George Eastman House (Rochester, USA), Tokyo MetropolitanMuseum of Photography, Royal Ontario Museum, Tate, Harvard University and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Dr Fiona Anderson isSenior Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art department at Newcastle University. Her work explores LGBTQ social and sexual cultures and art from the 1970s to the present with a particular interest in practices of gentrification and preservation, queerworld making practices and the politics of urban space, mostly in the USA and the UK. She is the author ofCruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz andNew York’s Ruined Waterfront(University of Chicago Press,2019).From 2016-2019, she was the UK Principal Investigator forCruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS QueerSexual Cultures(CRUSEV), a pan-European collaborative research project whichexplored LGBTQ social and sexual cultures of the 1970s and their significance for LGBTQ people and queer artmaking across Europe now and in the future.
Curated by MA Curating the Art Museum Group
The Courtauld and Somerset House collaborative digital programme is supported by
