Tender Archives

How three emerging artists are reinterpreting South Asia.

- By UPASANA DAS

What power do images have to remain with us today amidst a constant bombardment of visuality in our everyday lives and how can they provoke us about subjective realities in postcolonial South Asia? It might look unlikely but 30-year-old Yash Sheth, 24-year-old Gurdev Singh, and 27-year-old Laisul Hoque's studios bubble with similar questions even as they churn out very different creative and lens-based practices living in Delhi, Mumbai, and London, respectively.

Sheth treats photographs like his diary, dispatching from a club in Lower Parel to a fishman's village in Dharavi Island coded within his particular flavour of humour. Singh scours disobedient images in his family archive while maintaining a renegade practice constantly reinterpreting the image of the good Sikh boy. Hoque too turns towards his family photographs—particularly treating his own memory as archive—and wanting others to walk into distilled images with a strong affective marker.

Handpicked by Bazaar India, we walk into the studios of these three emerging artists, delving deeper into their practice, how they see the world around them, and what matters to them the most.

YASH SHETH

Yash Sheth isn’t a funny guy—or rather, he doesn’t think he is funny at all. The photographer had just returned from a shoot, and we were looking at a photo he had taken during Christmas in Uttan village of Dharavi Island where two blindfolded women smiled as they crouched down, looking for something on the ground—beside them a duck had reared its long neck, as if also a furry participant in the game. “It’s hard to describe how these funny things occur in my photos,” muses an incredulous Sheth when I laugh. “I am a serious guy.”