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EXHIBITIONS

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THE ‘SITTING ROOM’ STUDIO

In the Sikkim-Darjeeling Hills, family albums took the place of pride in our “sitting rooms”— often the very first area you’d come across upon entering a home. It was always shipshape and adorned with the finest decorative objects. A place to host guests and celebrate special occasions, sitting rooms were a performative stage where people expressed their identities and aspirations—a space meant to be seen and shown. The family albums, positioned with care on a center table, were at the heart of all this. Their placement was intentional, signifying the value to which they were held. 

 

Within this carefully curated environment, the photographs in the albums contributed to a more symbolic act of worldmaking. Photography and the physical space collaboratively engaged in myriad ways to express local agency and articulate imaginaries. The self-fashioning and self-presentation reflected personal efficacies as well as the collective socio-cultural landscape of the Sikkim-Darjeeling Hills of the 20th century.

 

Therefore, in our ‘Sitting Room’ Studio too, every object holds meaning, and every arrangement has something to tell. They evoke an essence of our community. And in this context, the photographs transcend mere acts of memorialization. Even in the most placid image-surfaces, there’s an anticipated animacy—stories from the Hills eagerly expecting to be tugged and pulled at.

The Sitting room' studio exhibition was a part of a group exhibition "LEGACY THREADS" in Shillong, Meghalaya, India March, 2024 curated by NE Archive

FUTURE LANDING 

At the Serendipity Arts Festival, we exhibited four digitized family albums, alongside the personal work of member Mridu Rai. Rai's project,  How Do I Bring You Home? , engages with the L.A. Waddell collection at the Royal Anthropological Institution, exploring colonial visual archives through diverse perspectives. 

 

Mridu Rai's  How Do I Bring You Home? is a personal engagement with the L.A Waddell collection at the Royal Anthropological Institution, London. It seeks different and multiple ways of seeing, listening and speaking to colonial visual archives. 

 

The Sufian Family Album offers a rich insight into the socio-cultural practices of a minority community—Tibetan Muslims, in the Darjeeling Hills. But at the same time, the album is reflective of how diverse communities have lived together in the region for decades through a seamless sense of belonging. 

 

Dr Graham’s Homes Archive holds historical importance in bringing together the colonial, racial underpinning of the empire in the construction and transformations of Kalimpong as a place. 

 

The Brihat Rai Family Album offers personal narratives that tells us stories of each individual and their perception of the self— in themselves and their relation to the family, their surroundings. The aesthetics for instance of the household with posters of deities and idols with the male patriarch dominating the frame opens an analytical space to understand how gendered structures unfold in subtle ways. 

 

Tseten Tashi Archive is a massive collection belonging to Tseten Tashi, the official photographer of the Chogyal of Sikkim and the King of Bhutan practising in the mid-1900s. He set up Sikkim’s first photographic studio, Tseten Tashi & Co., with his bathroom, initially, serving as its darkroom. His archive is of interest not only as a visual study of the region, but also in exploring a photographer’s role as documentarian.


The exhibition was a part of a Future Landing, Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa,  India / December, 2022 curated by Serendipityartsfestival

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