The cluster of six portraits which collectively make up Queer Samsara, one of the exhibits at the ongoing Inheritance exhibition at Kanike Studios in Bengaluru’s Cooke Town, has a retro, otherworldly feel to it, encapsulating ideas of transience and ephemerality. Aryan Gulati, the photographer, says that the artwork, described as bearing witness to the birth, death and rebirth of desi queerness, comes from a deeply personal space.

“I feel everyone performs different identities, and for me, it is performing my queerness,” says the Bengaluru-based Gulati (they/them), one of the 13 young South Asians– 6 from Bengaluru and 7 from Glasgow– exploring shared histories, memories and identities between South Asia and the UK, through photography. “I feel we do not have enough narratives about queer people, and there are different intersections we need to explore,” says Gulati, who deliberately chose to use salt prints, a fragile medium that quickly deteriorates if not stored and preserved right, for these portraits. “I was trying to draw a parallel between how it fades like identity,” they say.

Identity and inheritance

Ideas around identity, both individual and collective, are reflected in nearly every photograph on display at this exhibition, the outcome of an international collaboration between The Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) Bengaluru, Kanike, Glasgow Life Museums, and Street Level Photoworks as part of the British Council’s Our Shared Cultural Heritage (OSCH) programme.

Interestingly, the same body of work is being showcased in different iterations across four spaces: Kanike and the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru and the Glasgow Life Museums and Street Level Photoworks in the UK. And while there are minor variations linked to the space chosen, the core of it remains the same.

 As the MAP website puts it, the works in this exhibition include a diversity of approaches from portraiture and staged photography to documentary to interrogate how identities are constructed and reconstructed, perceived and imagined, contested and embraced. “They explore themes of family and cultural history, migration, place, class, gender identity, conventions of social life and notions of community – unpeeling the many layers of identity, customs, beliefs and values we inherit,” it states.

For young people

According to Shilpa Vijayakrishnan, Head of Education & Outreach at MAP, this Indo-UK collaborative project’s main objective is to bring young people to the fold of museums, heritage, and art spaces. “A lot of young people feel alienated from these spaces,” she says.

The various institutions involved in this project were keen to do this via a skill-building component that would lead to an exploration of these themes. In January this year, there was a public call-out in Bengaluru and Glasgow, asking young people between the ages of 16 and 25 who wanted to hone their photography skills to apply. “We both took the same approach, looking for participants who had little or no exposure to photography,” says Vijayakrishnan, adding that the idea was to give someone an opportunity to upskill themselves, in particularly, those who may have not had such exposure or opportunities before.

This was followed by an active skill-building process where both sets of young people were taken through a series of skill-building workshops. “We started off by focusing on getting local partners and making a training schedule on what sort of training they would receive,” she says, with participants in both cities going through a series of training activities, including online lectures and in-person workshops.

Diversity on display

After around three months of training, the young people were given around two-and-a-half months to develop their projects. While these projects took shape under the mentorship of artist collaborators in both cities, the final creative decisions lay with the participants, evident from the diversity of mediums and stories on display at Kanike.

Take, for instance, Malini Chakrabarty’s Diaspora Laal, a series of vibrant photographs that attempt to merge two worlds—India and Scotland— “a visual chronicle of the human journey across continents, echoing the universal desire for belonging, understanding and the shared colours of life,” as the exhibit’s label puts it. Or Amina Bashir’s haunting Teri Jaagah, a meditation on traditional gender roles told through a series of images representing the artist’s mother’s migration from her home in Pakistan to the alien country of Scotland.

Then there is Roshni Advani’s Ootak Baa, which documents the relationship between food and belonging; Chrislyn Naysha Pereira’s Beauty Queens Eat Red Onions, which brings together aspects of heritage, race and beauty; and Tanvi Mallapur’s Stitching Memories, a cyanotype on embroidered cloth, which serves as an ode to the inherited objects, memories and cultural traditions that shape one’s identity.

Grandmom’s memories

Mallapur, who has chosen to use Kasuti embroidery in this installation, says that she was inspired by a 50-year-old piece of cloth belonging to her grandmother that she had worked on while trying to learn Kasuti. “It was a practice piece, but really beautiful,” says Mallapur, whose discovery led her to think about all the things inherited from her family, including her love for any form of art. “I get my creative genes from my mother and grandmother. Their incredible artistic talent has shaped me.”

Inheritance is being showcased at Kanike Studios, Bengaluru & Sasken Digital Gallery, MAP, Bengaluru till 22 October.