Gauri Gill
Gauri Gill (b. 1970, Chandigarh, India) is a Delhi-based photographer. Her practice is complex because it contains several lines of pursuit. These include an almost two decade-long engagement with marginalised communities in rural Rajasthan called Notes from the Desert (since 1999)—this ongoing archive contains sub-series such as The Mark on the Wall, Traces, Birth Series, Jannat, Balika Mela, and Ruined Rainbow. She has explored human displacement and the migrant experience in 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. Beginning in early 2013, Fields of Sight is an equal collaboration with the renowned Adivasi artist, Rajesh Vangad, combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing to co-create new narratives.
Gill has exhibited within India and internationally. Most recently, her first major survey exhibition took place at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt in 2022, which continued on to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk in January 2023. Her work has also been shown at BAMPFA, Berkeley (2020), the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2019), Chobi Mela, Dhaka (2019), Chennai Photo Biennale (2021 and 2019), Museum Tinguely, Basel (2018), MoMA PS1, New York (2018), Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017), 7th Moscow Biennale (2017), Prospect 4, New Orleans (2017), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016), San Jose Museum of Art (2015), The Wiener Library, London (2014) and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010), among other places. She has also consistently exhibited at locations outside of the art world, including public libraries, rural schools, and non-profit institutions. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Museum, London; Smithsonian Institution, Washington and Fotomuseum, Winterthur.