Embody: Gender

18 December 2013

Indu Antony, From the series ManiFest

This issue will explore the theme of gender through various photographic practices, ranging from reportage to conceptual art. In dealing with a re-assessment of identity, this edition emerges at a time when there is a national and global consciousness about the intricacies of image making practices, and their constitution of our socio-cultural environment. This issue then is about photography and the formation of gender identities as well as the struggles that constitute that position.

EDITORIAL

The ‘Body’ Of The Nation

Urvashi Butalia

In 1947, as the British exited India – a trail of bloody violence, loot, rape and arson behind them – they left the country politically torn and divided on the basis of religion. Visual representations of a newly liberated India at the time almost always mapped the ‘body’ of the nation...

A Transactment of Images or Bodies in Space

Rahaab Allana

An operation of bodies lost in space, en medias res – actions and contortions as one occupies the other, takes him or her through a dream sequence – ethereal acrobats in a perennial battle to exist. Is this an enactment, an embodiment of a past edging into the present, a rebellion of freedoms...

Embodiments Of Resistance

Philippe Calia

While looking at any photograph, one could argue that photography is perhaps the medium that, more than any other, disembodies. Stripping the real to its bare reflection, a photograph would only provide us with a partial and muted account of a moment, an imprint of light and shapes on a sensitive...