An Exploration of Intimacy: Chandan Gomes' This World of Dew
On a lovely Fall evening in North Carolina and at a time when more than ten people could gather in a room with no qualms, photographer and bookmaker Chandan Gomes organised a pop-up exhibit at Duke University’s Rubenstein Arts Center. Showcased during his visiting fellowship at Duke in 2019, the pop-up presented images from Gomes’ photobook titled This World of Dew alongside a diverse collection of photographs captured over a period of time, portraying a wide range of themes and stories.
The exhibit offered a kaleidoscopic view of the artist’s journey with the camera as well as an insight into his photographic aesthetic and the practice that shaped it. The unrelated pictorial moments placed adjacent to each other in a linear fashion invoked a range of subjects and spaces that Gomes’ camera intuitively gravitated towards.
The centrepiece of the exhibit, This World of Dew was placed neatly and independently on a table for viewers to browse through. It narrated the artist’s visual journey in search of the young and terminally ill Aini Haseena Bano (2000–12) and the visions she left behind in her drawing book at a hospice in Jaipur, India. In the course of his search, Gomes replicated each of Bano’s thirty-two paintings with his camera. Neatly juxtaposed, the photographs and paintings are placed adjacent to each other in the format of a small book, the kind that one can fit in a pocket.
The intermediality of the work pushed against the putative distinction between photography and painting, reality and imagination, and the kind of paintings that are considered “gallery art.” As bookmaking and photography converge in Gomes’ practice, the affective aspects of his work become doubly layered. The tender portrayal of his search is experienced through a deeply intimate viewing practice—that of holding the book close and looking at it, at a pace of one’s choosing. The photobook lent a notion of permanence to this work.
Positioning this book within the format of a pop-up exhibit—halfway across the world from where it was composed—reconstituted its experience and meaning for the viewer in significant ways. The affective extent of the work becomes a moment charged by transience, which is further exaggerated when seen in relation to Gomes’ larger photographic oeuvre exhibited alongside the artwork. Tethered to the gallery, one of the last copies of Gomes’ This World of Dew became a tactile visual story whose permanence could only be experienced fleetingly by the viewer.
The free-standing photo-works and the photobook were tied together by the artist’s commitment to generate a discourse on photography that is intimate and worldly at the same time. By placing several apparently disconnected pictorial memories next to each other, the series of images placed the viewer in a position to see the self in relation to the world that is simultaneously unfolding beyond the personal. Gomes’ work—in this display and beyond—is imbued by a humanistic lens that redirects the documentary impulse of the camera towards an exploration of intimacy in everyday life.
To read more about Gomes’ work, please click here.
All images from Chandan Gomes' pop-up exhibit at Rubenstein Arts Center, Duke University. North Carolina, 2019. Images courtesy of Chandan Gomes and Chris Sims.
