Gauri Gill (b. 1970, Chandigarh, India) is a Delhi based photographer. She has exhibited within India and internationally. In 2022, her first major survey exhibition opened at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and travelled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk in January 2023.
Gill’s work has been shown at the The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2024), Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2024), Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2023), the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Chennai Photo Biennale (2021 and 2019), Chobimela, Dhaka (2019), MoMA PS1, New York (2018), Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017), 7th Moscow Biennale (2017), Prospect 4, New Orleans (2017), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016), The Wiener Library, London (2014) and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010), among other places. She has also consistently exhibited at locations outside of the art world, including public libraries, rural schools and non-profit institutions. Her work is in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Museum, London; Smithsonian Institution, Washington and Fotomuseum, Winterthur.
She received the prestigious Prix Pictet award for photography and sustainability in 2023. In 2011 she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography; and in 2002 she received the Fifty Crows Award (formerly called the Mother Jones) in San Francisco.
Gill’s practice is complex because it contains several lines of pursuit. These include a more than two decade long engagement with marginalised communities in rural Rajasthan called Notes from the Desert (since 1999)—this ongoing archive contains sub-series such as The Mark on the Wall, Traces, Birth Series, Jannat, Balika Mela, and Ruined Rainbow. She has explored human displacement and the migrant experience in The Americans and What Remains. Projects such as the 1984 notebooks highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and ‘active listening’, and in using photography as a memory practice. Beginning in early 2013, Fields of Sight is an equal collaboration with the renowned Adivasi artist, Rajesh Vangad, combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing to co-create new narratives. In her recent body of work, Acts of Appearance, (2015—), the artist has worked closely with the paper mache artists of the Kokna and Warli tribes in Maharashtra, using unique new masks to tell fictional stories improvised together of contemporary life in the village. Working in both black and white and colour, Gill addresses the Indian identity markers of caste, class and community as determinants of mobility and social behaviour; in her work there is empathy, surprise, and a human concern over issues of survival.
Gill has recently published two books with Edition Patrick Frey about her collaborations with rural artists, Acts of Appearance (2022) and Fields of Sight (2023). The book Fields of Sight is nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024.
