Gauri Gill (b. 1970) earned a BFA (Applied Art) from the College of Art, New Delhi; BFA (Photography) from Parsons School of Design/The New School, New York, and MFA (Art) from Stanford University, California. She has exhibited within India and internationally, including the 58th Venice Biennale; Museum Tinguely, Basel; MoMA PS1, New York; Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Kochi Biennale 2016; 7th Moscow Biennale; Wiener Library, London and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate Museum, London; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington and Fotomuseum, Winterthur. In 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography. Her most recent exhibitions include 'When All That Is Solid Melts into Air: Exploring the Intersection of the Folk and the Modern in Postcolonial India' at University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) (2020), Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu continuel' at National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa,(2020) ‘Object/Set: Gauri Gill’s Acts of Appearance’ at Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2020), The Life of Things’ Momenta Biennale de l’image, Montreal (2019). In September 2023 Gauri Gill
won tenth Prix Pictet, World’s leading photography and sustainability award.
Gauri Gill lives and works in New Delhi.
Gill’s practice is complex because it contains several lines of pursuit. These include an over two-decade long engagement with marginalised communities in rural Rajasthan called Notes from the Desert (since 1999) — this ongoing archive contains sub-series such as The Mark on the Wall, Traces, Birth Series, Jannat, Balika Mela, and Ruined Rainbow. She has explored human displacement and the migrant experience in The Americans and What Remains. Projects such as the 1984 notebooks highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and ‘active listening’, and in using photography as a memory practice. Beginning in early 2013, Fields of Sight is an equal collaboration with the renowned Adivasi artist, Rajesh Vangad, combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing to co-create new narratives. In her recent body of work, Acts of Appearance, (2015–), the artist has worked closely with the paper mache artists tribes in Maharashtra, using unique new masks to tell fictional stories improvised together of contemporary life in the village. Working in both black & white and colour, Gill addresses the Indian identity markers of caste, class, and community as determinants of mobility and social behaviour; in her work there is empathy, surprise, and a human concern over issues of survival.
“If I had the ability to create different visual identities to tell a story about my world, how would I do it? We are all heterogeneous beings, constituted of as many different selves as moments in time; we all ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’. Others read us in their own subjective ways, perhaps different from how we imagine ourselves to be. The question also arises, to whom does my face belong — me, or the world that views me?” — Gauri Gill.