Sunil Gupta Vintage Photographs from 1982-87

Vadehra Art Gallery participates in the Art Basel 2024 with a solo presentation of vintage photographs by Indian-Canadian, London-based artist Sunil Gupta. Sunil Gupta is a pioneering photographer, writer, curator and activist at the helm of post-colonial and post-modern identity politics and queer studies. Using photography, Gupta theatrically engages with the mores of the public sphere as well as the imaginations of the private and intimate, upholding a narrative focus on marginalized groups who navigate such thresholds through play and performance. These interventions often bear autobiographical weight thus nurturing Gupta’s viewpoints with an exceptional sensitivity into mainstream cultural consciousness to re-center subjects such as racism, alternative sexuality, migration, queer issues and marginalia.

Our curation includes a collection of vintage prints from three important series in Gupta’s oeuvre – London 1982, Lovers: Ten Years On and Exiles – photographed and produced over the 1980s in London, England, and Delhi, India. This special curation divulges the oppressive cultural apparatuses within which sub-cultures were overpowered and rendered invisible in the throes of mainstream society in London and Delhi in the 1980s. Whether visualizing the issue of invisible sub-cultures in London or the manufactured absence of gay Indian men, Gupta’s approach to the public site and its impact on private experiences raises interesting points of similarity and difference between two historically connected countries and their social sciences. England’s colonization of India left the latter with a kind of Victorian cultural hangover, where the act of labelling, of naming and shaming, has been promulgated for generations.