Above and below: Samples of her earlier work on the victims of India's 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms, the Sikhs of Kabul and Sikhs in America. [Some are shown in detail only.].
Art
Sikh-Indian Wins Grange Photography Prize
by JAMES ADAMS
A Sikh-Indian photographer based in New Delhi-whose work “often addresses ordinary heroism within challenging environments” is this year’s winner of the $50,000 Grange Prize for excellence in photography, it was announced Tuesday (November 2, 2011) evening in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Gauri Gill, 41, prevailed over three other finalists to take the award which is Canada’s largest photography prize and the only major Canadian art laurel to be selected by public vote. A total of more than 12,000 individuals cast votes online and at a computer polling station at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) where works by Gill and her fellow finalists have been exhibited since August 30.
Gill, who studied at New York’s Parsons School of Design and California’s Stanford University, works unapologetically in the documentary tradition. While she’s taken photographs of Sikh-Americans and others from the subcontinent in locales as varied as Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., she’s perhaps most famous for her decades-long study of the marginalized women, men and children of Rajasthan, India’s largest state.
In a video accompanying her AGO exhibition, Gill said she chose photography as an art form because it can be at once “deeply personal” and a medium “to take you out into the real world ... In an unequal world, photography has the kind of power to allow individuals to offer their personal interpretations” of that world and their place in it.
The Grange Prize was started in 2008 by the AGO and Aeroplan to foster the development and appreciation of contemporary photography. Each year, four photographers are selected as finalists by a jury - two from Canada and two from a partner country. Last year, it was the United States, the year before, Mexico, and this year, India, with the finalists chosen by AGO acting curator of Canadian art Michelle Jacques, Wayne Baerwaldt, acting vice-president of research and academic affairs at the Alberta College of Art + Design in Calgary, New Delhi-based critic/curator Gayatri Sinha and photographer/writer/curator Sunil Gupta from London and New Delhi.
The other finalists, each of whom received $5,000, were Nandini Valli of Chennai, India, Vancouver-based Althea Thauberger and Winnipeg native Elaine Stocki, who currently splits her time between the Manitoba capital and Brooklyn, N.Y. Each finalist receives an international residency: Gill and Valli were in Toronto for three weeks in September as artists-in-residence at the AGO, while Stocki and Thauberger are expected to visit India in 2012.
Gauri Gill is best known for her work on the Sikhs of Kabul, the victims of India's anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, and Sikhs who have made America their home.
The Grange Prize exhibition continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada, through Nov. 27, 2011.
[Courtesy: The Globe and Mail. Edited for sikhchic.com]
November 4, 2011