Paris Photo

Gauri Gill’s practice is driven by immersive, diverse and collaborative inquiries into rural, indigenous, marginalized and diasporic Indian communities. Through close and prolonged interactions with the communities she photographs, Gill distils a profound empathy into her work, exploring human stories of resilience, resistance and beauty. These narratives are framed within the cultural determinants of gender, caste, class and community that influence their agency and social behaviour.

Gill created the series The Village on the Highway from January to December 2021, as a visual homage to the creative ingenuity of the farmers contesting the proposed deregulation of agriculture that would further imperil their already fragile livelihoods. They remained on the roads leading into New Delhi through the COVID-19 pandemic and the extremes of the North Indian climate, including the freezing cold, searing heat and a dengue festering monsoon, transforming the farming vehicles that they arrived on, such as tractors, trolleys and tempos, into temporary makeshift homes. Gill was drawn to what she has called ‘an unusual, handmade and homegrown architecture of resistance, in which doors appeared through tarpaulin, and walls arose from bamboo’. Using a large analogue camera, she documented domestic, daily objects such as cooking pots, water tanks, khus coolers and mosquito nets, all of which innovatively enabled communal spaces for cooking, washing, bathing, storage, resting, reading, etc. The road itself was reconfigured into patches of earth to plant vegetables that provided sustenance. Guided by the Sikh tenets of langar, or communal food sharing, and seva, or selfless service, the farmers fed all who came, including the police opposing them, and members of the impoverished local population.