Gauri Gill

Delhi-based photographer Gauri Gill’s (born 1970) project Acts of Appearance began in 2014 at a village of Adivasi papier-mâché artists from the Kokna and Warli tribes in the Palghar district—one of the most impoverished areas in Maharashtra, India. Gill’s collaborator-subjects are renowned for their papier-mâché objects, which include traditional sacred masks made for the yearly Bohada procession. These masks depict living beings with the physical characteristics of people, animals or valued objects.
In the photographs gathered in this volume, the artists as well as other local volunteers engage in everyday village activities while wearing masks crafted specifically for this body of work. As a result, a fantastic range of symbolic and playful scenarios and narratives coalesce.

A collaboration between Indian photographer Gauri Gill (born 1970) and Indigenous Warli artist Rajesh Vangad (born 1975), Fields of Sight features spare black-and-white landscape photos of the Indian countryside from Gill, overlaid with swirling, tribally inspired illustrations by Vangad. The series began in early 2013 in Ganjad, Dahanu, an Adivasi village in coastal Maharashtra, India. Looking at her contact sheets, Gill saw that although the camera was capturing this distinctive landscape, it was missing vital aspects that were vividly relayed in the mythical stories narrated to her by Vangad. The photographs by Gill, inscribed by drawings by Vangad, reconfigure the photographic site both formally and conceptually; in the act of viewing the landscape through the eyes of Vangad, Gill rekindles the need to challenge the limitations of our perspectives.