Sunil Gupta | Mr. Malhotra’s Party

Exhibition Dates: June 6 – July 18, 2009

Reception for the Artist: Thursday, June 11^th, 5-8pm

The gallery is pleased to present “Mr Malhotra’s Party”, a series of photographic portraits by Sunil Gupta that address contemporary issues of gender and sexuality in Delhi, India.

Gupta’s (b. New Delhi, India, 1953) photographs, known for being political yet intimate, have chronicled the experiences of Delhi’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community since the 1980s. Gupta’s series entitled “Exiles” presented constructed documentary images of gay men in architectural spaces in Delhi. The faces of these men were shielded or cropped in order to conceal the individual’s identity. Gupta explains, “At a very basic level, gay men in India do not have an image. Literally,” He believes that “photography has a big role to play in providing us with an image of ourselves. And as a maker of photographs I see it as my role to make pictures that people can relate to.”

Now, almost thirty years later, people are meeting less in parks and secluded areas and more on the internet, and in “private” parties. Gay nights at local clubs in Delhi are always sign-posted as private parties in a fictitious person’s name to get around Section 377, a British colonial law, which criminalizes homosexuality in India. In “Mr Malhotra’s Party”, Gupta visualizes this latest queer space with a series of portraits of ‘real’ people who identify their sexuality as ‘queer’ in some way. These individuals confront the camera as they are now willing to identify themselves. They are situated in Delhi’s crowded urban landscape, where people live and work. They are part of the vernacular, the everyday, and proudly embrace their queer identity.