PAST COFFEE TALK
Just Wide Enough To Hold The Weight
Marvel Harris, Siddhartha Hajra, and Soumya Sankar Bose
Curated by:
Date:
Artist:
PAST COFFEE TALK
Just Wide Enough To Hold The Weight
Marvel Harris, Siddhartha Hajra, and Soumya Sankar Bose
Join us on Saturday, May 21st at 3pm ET for a walkthrough and coffee talk on IG Live with curator Phalguni Guliani and artists Marvel Harris, Siddhartha Hajra, and Soumya Sankar Bose, discussing their group exhibition Just Wide Enough To Hold The Weight on view at Baxter St until June 8th.
Bringing together new and recent works by Marvel Harris, Siddhartha Hajra and Soumya Sankar Bose, curator Phalguni Guliani builds a presentation that treads the space between self-portraiture and staged dreamscapes. What distinguishes the work of these artists and activates a cross dialogue between their practices, is the self-reflective gaze and a space for collaboration that each enables within their individual inquiry.
Marvel Harris is a photographer born and raised in the Netherlands. Marvel’s photographic work revolves around his experiences as an autistic, non-binary transgender artist who has struggled with mental health problems for many years. Marvel graduated from the University of Applied Photography in Apeldoorn in 2018. Marvel has since won several prizes with his work, including the 1st prize of the prestigious Zilveren Camera in the documentary category (2018), and was selected by LensCulture as one of the Emerging Talents (2019), and by Foam as one of the Foam Talents (2022). Marvel’s work is shown both in the Netherlands and abroad at fairs and exhibitions, such as Melkweg Expo (Amsterdam), World Press Photo Exhibition (Rotterdam), Museum Hilversum, Paris Photo, Musea Zutphen, and Webber Gallery (London). In 2020, Marvel self-published the photo book MARVEL. The book won MACK’s First Book Award and got republished in 2021.
Siddhartha Hajra calls himself an instinctual maker of photographs, capturing life as it unfolds before his eyes. For over a decade, he has chronicled the cities of India and those who occupy the margins of it. In this time, he has both attended and facilitated photo workshops with Michael Akerman, Jonathan Torgovnik, and gender collectives in Calcutta. Siddhartha’s expertise lies in capturing the work of international aid organizations with the sensitivity of his training as an erstwhile Professor of Sociology. He currently works as a documentary photographer with UNICEF and has published with the likes of BBC, Human Rights Watch, and National Geographic.
Soumya Sankar Bose is a photographer from Bengal, India. He graduated from the one-year diploma program at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka. In his practice, Soumya uses photography, archival material, text, and film to explore desire, identity, and memory. His first book Where the Birds Never Sing (2020) on the Marichjhapi massacre, the forcible eviction in 1979 of lower caste Bengali refugees on Marichjhapi Island in Sundarban, India, and the subsequent death of thousands by police gunfire, starvation, and disease; was shortlisted for the First PhotoBook Award in the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award in 2020. Soumya was awarded Magnum Foundation’s Social Justice fellowship for his Full Moon on a Dark Night project. His other projects are also a recipient of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art’s Amol Vadehra Art Grant, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan’s Five Million Incidents, Henry Luce Foundation’s grant, and India Foundation for the Arts grant. In 2019, he was one of the recipients of World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass.
Phalguni Guliani is an exhibition-maker based in New Delhi, India. She is interested in the inner lives of women and of quotidian objects, seeking to explore these through a practice that pirouettes between writing and contemporary curatorial art. Her latest exhibitions include Vermont Studio Center, Vermont (2022); The Clemente, New York (2022); and Mumbai Art Room, India (2021). She was awarded the Bianca Patton Fellowship for Young Women Writers (2019) to attend India’s leading residency for writers – Sangam House, and was invited to the Canserrat Residency in El Bruc, Spain (2018). Her texts have appeared in Frieze, Ocula, and the Indian Quarterly magazine among others.
This exhibition is part of Baxter St’s Guest-Curated Program and is made possible with the support of the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.