Gauri Gill: Acts of Appearance | 2022

With 126 color images across 188 pages, including new unseen images, and essays in Hindi and English by Gauri Gill and Yuvraj Bhagvan Kadu, Acts of Appearance represents the collaborative project between Gill and the acclaimed Adivasi papier-mâché artists Subhas and Bhagvan Dharma Kadu, as well as close to forty other village members.

Begun in 2015, it assumed its form within a village of Kokna and Warli tribes in Palghar district. Further inland from Dahanu, it is one of the most impoverished districts in Maharashtra, India. Gill’s collaborator-subjects are renowned for their papier-mâché objects, including traditional sacred masks made for the yearly Bohada procession. In these pictures the artists as well as other local volunteers engage in everyday village activities while wearing new masks, made by them expressly for this body of work. The new creations depict living beings with the physical characteristics of ordinary humans, commonplace animals, or quotidian objects. A range of scenarios and narratives, situated in both “reality” and dreamlike states, come together in the photographs, which simultaneously portray symbolic or playful representations as well as the familiar experiences of community members against the backdrop of their home and culture.