Just Wide Enough To Hold The Weight

About

Bringing together new and recent works by Marvel Harris, Siddhartha Hajra and Soumya Sankar Bose, curator Phalguni Guliani builds a presentation that treads the space between self-portraiture and staged dreamscapes.

What distinguishes the work of these artists and activates a cross dialogue between their practices, is the self-reflective gaze and a space for collaboration that each enables within their individual inquiry. Just Wide Enough to Hold the Weight opens on May 4 and will remain on view at Baxter St gallery until June 8, 2022. It is part of the organization’s annual guest-curated series that invites curators to propose a project that will expand the notion of lens-based practices and is selected by a jury of Baxter St supporters.The exhibition’s chief question – what happens when someone has the agency to tell their own story – is signposted by its very first work on display, and perhaps also its quietest that greets viewers alongside a towering poem, as they enter the gallery. As Marvel Harris’ autobiographical series Inner Journey unfolds, taking off from this early self-portrait of the artist against a mountainous backdrop, viewers are presented with a visual diary that chronicles the rawness of the artist’s gender transition and in equal measure the tenderness of a coming-of-age tale that is informed by his neurodivergent adolescence. For Harris, who describes his process of image-making as a “way to understand emotions that can’t be put in words”, the series represents an ongoing search for himself that extends beyond gender identity, marking his transition as a “human being with feelings that are constantly in flux” 

Echoing this ricochet between deep interiorities of the body and the vastness of the landscapes it occupies, is Soumya Sankar Bose’s Full Moon on a Dark Night – a series of portraits realized from the artist’s critically sustained interaction with members of the LGBTQ community in India. Sharing their dreams and anxieties in extensive interviews with him, Bose’s collaborators played a key role in determining the staging of the photographs, and are thus as much the co-authors of the portraits as the artist himself. “In the surreal wakefulness of Bose’s imagery where animalistic apparitions and estranged half-glances seem to have just woken from a dream, it is not uncommon to find the narrative plunging us in oceanic waters one moment and surfacing in a bathtub next” says the exhibition’s curator Phalguni Guliani about her choice of a sequence that shows the large and largely inscrutable axes of scale and psychology across which Bose’s subjects view themselves.

Turning this gaze from looking at oneself to looking at an intimate other, is Siddhartha Hajra’s I See You Better in the Dark – a series of portraits built from participatory storytelling workshops the artist conducts for members of the Kothi community in India, that facilitate a unique self-representation of gender identity. “Whether it is on broken beds or amidst grassy fields, the framing that you see of the people in these photographs is not only an exercise in looking by their fellow participants, but equally an exercise in friendship” says Hajra.  

Taking its title from an Emily Dickinson verse, Hajra’s crisp sequence or “photo-poems” as the artist calls them, is presented atop a light-table structure that fills the gallery space by cutting a line across it, much in the same way a handwritten note would across paper. In this scenography, Hajra says “There is a profound quietness for me in these images. They speak to you in no dulcet tones, but almost a whisper. I wanted that quality to shine through in the way light passes through their surface, creating a sense of something that you want to hold so close and yet feel inveterately slipping. Like the rush of knowledge tapping your shoulder ever so gently one afternoon in a dimly lit library perhaps, glowing and waning at the same time”

Bookending this wavelike lyricality on the gallery’s central wall, are a selection of three large prints from Hajra’s Opera Monorama series – an ongoing documentation of the lives of transgender performance artists with whom the artist has closely worked with over the years. Like I See You Better in the Darkbefore it, the mirror-like images in this series too, signal that this is an artist who consciously refuses to accept darkness as a state of fecundity. Hajra’s work instead pushes viewers to ask – what parts of ourselves might remain shrouded to us and yet visible to those closest to us? In pointing towards the potential of darkness as a tool in understanding the self, he urges us towards that which can be still be seen or rather that which becomes newly see-able, when our eyes have become, to borrow from Dickinson again – “accustomed to the dark” 

For an exhibition that begun with the promise of agency to its photographic subjects, a display fore-fronting the narratives of queer bodies as put forth in their own voices thus asks – can such agency lead to a crack, a fissure in perception as constructed by a photographic ‘other’? Can that crack be a tectonic rupture ‘just wide enough to hold the weight’ of a newfound narrative and yet thin enough to shine light in on it? 

“If to curate is to care, what I hope to nurture in this exhibition is a space where marginalized identities (in this case of gender) can fashion their own truths, their own fictions” says Guliani, “For too long in our colonial understanding of photography, the figure of the photographer has been the one who has the power to construct a narrative of his own choice. I’m interested in looking at practices that give that power to the subjects, and ask if there is a dignified way of doing this within the photographic arts that pushes the medium to introspect itself?”

Alongside the exhibition, free public programming will be accessible to Baxter St’s community of engaged creators. Highlights include a special screening of the documentary Alles is Nu by filmmaker Jessica Villerius, and a coffee talk conversation between the curator Phalguni Guliani and the artists Marvel Harris, Siddhartha Hajra and Soumya Sankar Bose. Please visit Baxter St’s website for more information. 

This exhibition is part of Baxter St’s Guest-Curated Program and is made possible with the support of the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.