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BIRTH SERIES (2005, first shown in 2010)

The set of photographs was made when Gill lived some days with a great midwife in a remote village in Motasar, Ghafan. Kasumbi Dai had invited Gill to photograph her deliver her granddaughter. The photographer assisted with the birth. Kasumbi Dai died in 2010.

“One room in the gallery contains a series of small photographs in which the elderly midwife Kasumbi is delivering her granddaughter on the sandy floor of their desert hut. The veiled mother-to-be, arms clad to the shoulders in ivory bangles, strains and pushes. The midwife helps by pressing the soles of her feet against the laboring woman’s and grasps her hands to create resistance. We see the infant’s emerging head and the outstretched hands guiding it into the world, and then the newborn gasping its first breaths in the sand.

The great dramas of life and death, love and longing, growth and change, captured in these images are presented with the same matter-of-factness that accompanies these great life passages is this place — with unadorned humanity rather than maudlin sentimentality.”

- excerpted from Maya Kovskaya's review, 2010

ARTIST BIO

Gauri Gill (b. 1970) received a BFA in Applied Art at the Delhi College of Art, New Delhi, a BFA in Photography at the Parsons School of Design, New York and an MFA in Art at Stanford University, California.

Solo exhibitions include: ‘Balika Mela’ and ‘Jannat’: Thomas Erben Gallery, New York (2014), Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi (2012); ‘What Remains’: Green Cardamom Gallery, London (2011); ‘Notes from the Desert’: Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, Matthieu Foss Gallery, Mumbai, Focus Gallery, Chennai, Urmul Setu, Lunkaransar (2010-11); ‘The Americans’: Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, Thomas Welton Art Gallery, Stanford University, the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Bose Pacia Gallery, Kolkata and New York, Mississauga Central Library, Mississauga (2008-2011).

Group exhibitions include: ‘Punctum’ Curated by Seamus Healey: Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2014); ‘Insert 2014’ Curated by Raqs Media Collective: IGNCA, New Delhi (2014); ‘Citizen Artist: forms of Address’ Curated by Geeta Kapur: Chemould Prescott Gallery, Mumbai (2013); ‘The Needle on the Gauge’ Curated by Ranjit Hoskote: The Contemporary Art Institute of Southern Australia, Adelaide (2012); ‘Lines of Control’ Curated by Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar: Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Nasher Museum, Duke University (2012); The Grange Prize Exhibition’ Curated by Michelle Jacques: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2011); ‘Shifting Shapes: Unstable Signs’ Curated by Robert Storr and Jaret Vadehra: Yale Art Gallery, Yale University, New Haven (2009); ‘Public Places, Private Spaces’ Curated by Paul Sternberger and Gayatri Sinha: The Newark Museum, New Jersey as well as two person shows with Seher Shah at Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2014); Tomoko Yoneda at Lucy Mackintosh Gallery, Lausanne (2009); and Sunil Gupta at India International Centre, New Delhi (2007).

Her work is in the collections of prominent North American and Indian institutions, and in 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography.