Zameen Aasman Ka Farq
(formerly
Jugaad / Of Intimacy and Love)
2016 - ongoing
In India, the language generally used to describe men holding hands or interlocking pinkies, embracing or leaning intimately into one another, is “friendship.”
In
Zameen Aasman Ka Farq ("As far apart as the Earth is from the Sky"), I focus on the affection between Indian men: physical touch that offers a window into the meanings of friendship, love, sexuality and queerness. In photographs and texts, the work aims to visualize the many dimensions that love takes on for my collaborators, from the open and the socially accepted to the unspoken.
Since 2017 I have collaborated with people from a broad variety of backgrounds and identities, including nonbinary, on making analog, medium-format portraits and digital video footage and recording over 140 conversations in 13 languages, resulting in over 4000 pages of transcripts.
With translators, I have traveled to cities and villages across these territories: West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh.
Features include
British Journal of Photography by Diane Smyth (2017), and
LensCulture's Art Photography Awards ('Juror's Pick' by Alona Pardo, 2018).
Please
email for access to a more comprehensive selection of the work.
Assistants:
Sohel Khondekar, Mubeen Siddiqui, Jaideep Kshirsagar, Rohan Mathews, Deepesh Meher, Avadhoot Potdar, Chetan Sharma, Ayu Bhagat; Chunyu Wang (NY Studio).
Transcription/Translation Team:
Chikirsha Prakash, Daksh Goyal, Chakshu Sharma, Deb Sanyal, Ankit Andurlekar, Niranjan Nampoothiri, Sreyartha Krishna, J. Mandakini, Sraiyanti Haricharan, Vaishnavi Suresh, Shivakumar Lanka, Bindu B., Karan Malhotra.