Ajit Bhadoriya recently concluded his
bangaloREsidency-Expanded at the
C. Rockefeller Center for Contemporary Arts in Dresden and will now present the
outcome of his residency in a
photography exhibition titled
If You're at the
Forplay Soceity in Kochi from
January 20 to 27, 2023.
© Ajit Bhadoriya
Ajit works primarily with the camera lens. He explores themes of home, displacement, the tension between the urban and the rural divided by the fragile representation of nature, the longing for home, and landscapes in the making.
''Growing up in India, European landscape art, or landscapes modelled on the European vision of the scenic was a massive part of the popular visual culture around me. Screensavers, desktop backgrounds, and photo posters - all depicted natural landscapes that were unfamiliar in location, and yet at the same time, extremely familiar in concept. When I encountered the same landscape in real life, my immediate instinct was to turn the natural landscape into a background for an object that has become a universal tool in the photography trade; the seamless studio backdrop.''
A response to the perceived and constructed relationships between the natural landscape and photographic image. If You’re… references several tropes and tools of photographic image making. The work looks at the ‘background’ and its ontology. The word ‘background’, here, applies to both the commercially available seamless photo backdrops (whose names are inspired by nature) as well as the scenic landscapes amidst which the studio backdrop is installed.
The history of image making, especially when it comes to creating landscape imagery, is linked to several concepts – the scenic; sublime; exploration and so on. The framed landscape painting for instance served as an optical illusion that mimicked a window to the outside world. This work dwells on how these landscapes, or ideas of the scenic, become genericised in editorial and studio photography and have evolved over time to merely signify the scenic by a flat, seamless background.
The
Forplay Society is a temporary exhibition project of the
C.Rockefeller Center,
Walkin Studios and
Forplay Productions and shows as partner of the
Kochi-Muziris-Biennale media-artistic positions from Dresden, Germany, Switzerland, India, Belgium, Singapore, USA and many more.
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