GHAR & LIBBAS

 

My curatorial collaborations with the Indian-born, Melbourne-based contemporary photographer Anu Kumar in the Charkha and Kargha exhibition advanced in two different but connected directions. In the first project, we loaned four major photographs from the artist. This series of untitled photographs was from the Ghar (meaning home) project created by the artist in her birth town in India between 2017 and 2019. We selected these four photographs for inclusion in the exhibition because through them visitors could observe the daily usage of Indian textiles among contemporary local societies within India.

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The second part of Anu Kumar’s collaboration with the exhibition was the Libbas (2022) photographic project commission based on daily life of Indian communities today in the states of Victoria and New South Wales. Here, during three months the artist has observed with the lens of her camera different aspects of traditional Indian households and families.

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This commissioned project included sixteen photographs which were beautifully installed in the exhibition beside Sangeeta Sandrasegar’s installation. Here, again based on my curatorial strategies, I created a visual dialogue between the artworks of both contemporary artists and also the rest of the exhibition materials. Eight photographs of the Libbas project were also acquired (2023) by the Powerhouse for the newly created Powerhouse Photography collection.

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