Date: November 29, 2022
Time: 6 pm – 7 pm
Venue: Gulf Photo Plus, Alserkal Avenue
Registration: Click here
Ishara Art Foundation in collaboration with Gulf Photo Plus is pleased to present Guftugu Jaari Rahe, a public talk by photographer, curator and publisher Anshika Varma.
In 2018, Varma founded Offset Projects out of New Delhi, India, to explore the various engagements and sociological impacts of receiving the world through creative expressions in visual language. Offset Projects is an initiative that hopes to create channels of engagement in photography and book-making through workshops, residencies, artist talks, curated pop-up reading rooms and collaborations in publishing.
For this talk, Varma will talk about her project and its first publication, the Guftgu book, featuring works by practitioners from India, Nepal and Pakistan. The Guftgu book looks at the interrogations and practices of 10 contemporary photographers in South Asia presented as individual chapters designed in context to each artists practice and process. The works featured look at inquiries on identity formation and history building through perspectives of gender, caste and inheritance among many others. Emerging out of dialogues with practitioners when the world seemed restrained physically, the works incorporated in this curation expand on a growing visual language within South Asia and its diaspora. It offers a complex study of a land in transit, triggered by personal responses of photographers to their contemporary climates.
With works by
Adira Thekkuveettil
Diwas Raja KC
Amarnath Praful
Jaisingh Nageshwaran
Arko Datto
Nandita Raman
Arun Vijai Mathavan
Nida Mehboob
Cheryl Mukherjee
Uma Bista
For more information on Offset Projects, visit www.offsetprojects.in
The talk will be delivered in English. Please RSVP as seats are limited.
Anshika Varma
Anshika Varma (b. 1985) is a photographer, editor, curator and publisher with an interest in personal, collective and mythical histories. She is the founder of Offset Projects, an artist-led initiative in New Delhi, India, that works to create channels of engagement in photography and book-making through workshops, residencies, artist talks, pop-up reading rooms and collaborative exercises in publishing. Combining her curiosity to study cultural and social evolution with storytelling, her work often looks at the emotional connection between the individual and their environment. Anshika’s works and curations have been part of exhibitions, festivals and panel conversations at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Photo Kathmandu, Chennai Photo Biennale. She has been invited to speak within educational institutions and festival programming on subjects of photography, publishing and the growth of the visual language in South Asia and continues to teach on these subjects at institutions such as Yale (Connecticut), NUS (Singapore), Photography Studies College (Melbourne) and Ashoka University (Sonipat). Her writing has been part of publications such as Aperture Magazine, Photobooks& and the Alkazi Foundation. Her practice is defined through processes of collective participation and creation of work seperate from institutional systems.
About Gulf Photo Plus
Gulf Photo Plus is Dubai’s center for photography, equipping and inspiring the local and international photography community through photography workshops, free artist talks, state-of-the-art printing services, and the region’s longest-running international photography event, GPP Photo Week.
For more information, visit www.gulfphotoplus.com
