In Conversation:
Sunil Gupta & Charan Singh

FESTIVAL SPEAKERs

Sunil Gupta is a British/Canadian citizen, (b. New Delhi 1953) MA (RCA) PhD (Westminster) who lives in London and has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice for many years focusing on race, migration and queer issues. A retrospective was shown at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2020/21) and The Image Centre, Toronto. He is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham. His latest book is “We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference, Selected Writings by Sunil Gupta”, Aperture New York 2022. His work is in many private and public collections including; the Tokyo Museum of Photography, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum, Tate, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. His work is represented by Hales Gallery (New York, London), Materià Gallery (Rome), Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto) and Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi).

Charan Singh’s (b. New Delhi, India 1978) research-based practice is informed by his close involvement with HIV/AIDS work and ‘queer’ community activism in India. He retrained as a photographer after moving to the UK earning an MFA (UCA 2014), and PhD (RCA 2022). Singh uses the mediums of photography, video and text to explore his 'pre-English language' gay life. He is researching how language shapes queer landscapes, politics of representation and legitimacies of a queer history in India and other post-colonial sites. An important methodology has been understanding the significance of storytelling and translation within indigenous queer identities in lieu of available Western models of LGBTIQ+. His first institutional show is currently on view at The Art House, Wakefield. He recently participated in group shows at Camden Art Centre, London, and New Art Gallery, Walsall.  His collaborative work “Dissent and Desire” has been seen at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India 2018, and at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, (catalogue), January—April 2018, and at SepiaEye, New York 2017. Singh has earned a Magnum/Photo London award in 2016 for his portrait series “Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others", which featured in The Photoworks Annual (UK), 2017. His writing appeared in Photo South Asia 2022, TAP Review 2020, and On Curating 2019. Singh has been commissioned by Visual Aids (New York), The Art House, Wakefield and Fierce, Birmingham. His work is in several private collections.

A Queer Act of, Resistance, Repair and Love

“Our photographic practices come together as a dialogue between us and the world we inherit. Sometimes we find overserves in a world of excessive and overly saturated representations of queer people, yet so many stories remain untold. Through our collaborative projects we embarked on the question — how, as artists, do we engage with the void that exists, and how can we bridge it?  A question that has always been at the core of our critical practices. The ongoing project, Lovers’ Revisited, displays queer domesticities, joyfully confronting sites upon which the world has observed a silence for a long time. It also reveals a trans-national narrative of love, desire and migration. Our other co-authored works Dissent and Desire and Arrival touch upon disparity, not just regarding the unequal distribution of capital and privileges but also about the distribution of knowledge and opportunities to express oneself. These projects were initiated to narrate and reflect upon each individual life, the personal and political consequences of queerness which foregrounds queer lives as praxis.”

Images courtesy the artists and Hales Gallery, Materià Gallery, Stephen Bulger Gallery, SepiaEye and Vadehra Art Gallery. © Sunil Gupta. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024.