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A Spot in the Mountains and Minds
Aakansha Rastogi visits the photography exhibition by Ayesha Kapur and Siya Singh at Gallery Espace and says that the pictures are taken in an obliquely clichéd manner. The reviewer has her reasons to say so and she substantiates her points through the works of the young photographers taken at Dharmsala, the land of Tibetan exile in India.
Documentation as a mode or recording History and cultural changes has its own risks and set of presumptions that work behind the lenses in framing the subject. ‘A spot in the Mountains’, an exhibition by two photographers – Ayesh Kapur and Siya Singh, and curated by Arjun Sawhney, goes on to document the Tibetan community in exile at Dharamshala. Interrogating their course through two aspects religious and modern, i.e. their monks and the youth, the two sets of images approach the genre in an obliquely clichéd manner. I call it obliquely clichéd because there are signs of reinventions in an exploratory mode, witnessing the reformulation of new identities caused by displacement.
Cultural investments made by the Tibetan community in exile to ensure their lineage and a sense of order and keep alive the hope to tread their way back home someday is noteworthy. TIPA (Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts) is one of the examples, promoting the traditional arts of Tibet in original form and keeping it alive among their youth. However, the second generation Tibetans, born and brought up in India faces the crisis of an ambivalent identity. The two photographers claim to deal with these ambivalent identities.
The images of Ayesha Kapur capture the youth and their spaces –both private and public… catching them in moments of retrieval when they are either relaxing and relishing the activity they are engaged in – be it nap on the stage floor, in the greenroom, playing cards, shaking a leg in the corner coffee shop… youth in leisure. My particular favourite picture and an exception in the series is the one that shows an adolescent boy sitting with an elderly lady who is knitting, in the drawing room setting of a Tibetan house. The book shelf in the backdrop and a picture of Dalai Lama along with Mahatma Gandhi and a Tibetan leader (perhaps a Rinponche), plus the flag become tokens of the loss and gain. Gandhi, the icon of India has been adopted and placed with veneration on the wall. Also, the dilemmas that a young generation Tibetan is bound to face becomes more acute and psychological in this nonchalant young boy, with the elders trying their best to upkeep the tradition, metaphorically suggested in the act of knitting.
As Siya Singh zooms into the monastic order of things, she focuses on the red robe clad monks. Her images are expository in nature as they reveal as well as explore the private kneelings of a monastic life. Pictures being mostly set in the private rooms of these young monks living in the monastery in Macleod Ganj, which is also the Holy seat of Dalai Lama, shows these monks uninhibitedly allowing a peep into their likes and leisure. The mis-e-scene is interesting, for each small detail captured in the frame calls for individual attention – the magazines, the posters, mirror and the creams, deodorants kept on the dressing table, monks surfing the internet and connecting with the virtual world, monk shaving his head as an act of initiation.
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