These artists manifest their attentiveness to the otherness of other places through distinctive approaches, ranging from cosmopolitan curiosity and activist engagement through bafflement and anxiety to empathy and melancholia. Here, we find portraits of workers who have been effectively indentured far away from their homes. As well as encounters with street people, performers and characters who express their agency even in vulnerable situations. We marvel at the social portraiture of people caught up in radical, historic uncertainty. We are struck by the intransigent human impulse towards assembly, protest and resistance against oppression.
In the work of Kishore, Rahman, Jodha, and Uttamchandani, we come upon epic unease and forms of solidarity against the machines of oppression; upon forms of labour and livelihood crafted at the margins around emphatic centres; upon strategies of survival and flourishing in inhospitable and even hostile social terrain. In a Levinasian phrase, when these photographers look upon the “brimming face of the Other”, they reach out in compassion and in acknowledgement of the beating pulse of the Other – yet in that very moment and gesture, powerfully, they also recognise and articulate the precariousness of the viewing, regarding, witnessing Self and its own provisional, re-fabricated, shapeshifting locale.
OTHERLAND offers traces of events as well as chronicles of processes. The title registers a play on the trope of the motherland – in nationalist rhetoric, the true and proper site of belonging and self-definition. This exhibition speculates on how, while engaging with the aura of place, the artist acts both as infiltrator and pilgrim, witness and participant, an outsider who essays the role of insider, drafting renewed modes of connecting.
Artists: Naveen Kishore, Ram Rahman, Ritesh Uttamchandani, and Samar Jodha
Image Credits: Ram Rahman, 'At the 'No Kings' anti-Trump march (New York, June, 2025)'
The Old GMC Complex
