Pilbara perspective

From March 20-26, FORM, an independent, notfor-profit Western Australian cultural organisation hosted iconic Indian photographers Bharat Sikka, Ketaki Sheth and Sohrab Hura, along with Curator Devika Daulet Singh. The photographers were on a cross-cultural exchange programme which included exhibitions, artist talks and most profoundly, a trip to Western Australia’s remote Pilbara region.

FORM’s engagement with these eminent Indian creative artists began with an exhibition as part of Divergence: Photographs from Elsewhere at the Midland Railway Workshop. This monumental showcase of photography from around the world was headlined by the three Indian photographers and renowned Magnum photographer, Martin Parr.

Heralded as the ‘must see’ exhibition of the Foto Freo Festival 2012, the event had two thousand people visiting within the first two days. On March 17, Sohrab Hura and Ketaki Sheth presented a slideshow on their respective bodies of work, and answered questions to an enthralled audience.

Bharat Sikka exhibited his series, Matter. Sikka is a mercurial creative - he photographs landscapes and portraits; moves between the studio and the street; between rural and urban India; from highend commercial photography on assignments for magazines like Wallpaper, Vanity Fair, Vogue India and The New Yorker, to directing advertisements in a cinematic style as a Creative Director.

In Matter, we see Sikka’s distinct mode of visual storytelling, as he lures the viewer into an illusory world that collapses the boundaries between art and commerce.

Sikka is adept at creating moods and evoking emotion; he crafts longing and desire, illustrated in his poignant, romantic and intimate portrait of Carla Bruni, created for her No Promises album cover. Yet, his most compelling and intriguing images are developed as part of his personal projects, Indian Men, Space in Between and Salvador do Mundo which belong to the realm of fine contemporary art.

With his medium format camera, Sikka composes conceptually driven and visually sumptuous images that capture India as it transitions through a complex and awkward metamorphosis, grappling with globalization and the rapid changes brought about by accelerated, social and economic growth.

Ketaki Sheth’s exhibition Twinspotting, takes one inside the homes of the Patels, a community with a high percentage of twins (one in every 300 people is an identical twin, while one in 99 are fraternal). Sheth introduces the viewer to the immigrant community’s diaspora from the UK and Gujarat in India, from where they originated. The Patels are a highly migratory community and were the first Indians to move in large numbers to East Africa during the late 1960s and early 1970s, before settling in the UK and US, where they remain one of the largest immigrant populations. Sheth has won the Sanskriti Award for Indian photography (1992) and Japan’s Higashikawa Award (2006) for best foreign photographer. In 2008, she was honoured with a special show of 50 works from her series Bombay Mix at Fête du livre in Aix-en-Provence. Sheth began taking pictures on the streets of Mumbai almost twenty years ago, under the guidance of renowned