Body Shop

I liked these photographs by Ramesh Kalkur from an article in The Hindu (though I don't know whether the graininess is intentional, or is the result of newspaper-quality photo reproduction):

(From the article): RAMESH KALKUR prefers to stand with his back to the world, or so it seems at first glance, when we encounter the images of headless torsos in his recent exhibition "Body Shop", held at the Pundole Art Gallery and Gallery Chemould in Mumbai. The back is the principal subject manifested in the exhibition, which consists of three sections: a sequence of larger-than-life acrylic paintings; a painting installation; and a suite of photographs....


The Gallery Chemould's website quotes Kalkur:
An attempt at this thematic concern and technique was done in 1999 for a group show “Territory” organized by “Visthar” Bangalore. Three works were executed with the idea of treating body as territory and looking at parallel between body and tree in aspects of the grounded ness and belonging to particular social, political and cultural entity. This led to an ambitious project of documenting trees which have been used and treated for various purposes in typical Indian urban setup. Selected slides from documentation were then projected on to my body in order to arrive at final result. Technically it helped me to layer my thoughts around body as subject as well as object. Here body has been treated as site where various social and political issues can manifest itself through images of trees. The choice of rare view was to retain an anonymity of a posed subject and to achieve mannequin like form. This also brings in associations pertaining to the subject of gaze.

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