NATURE MORTE PRESENTS ‘THE SAPPER’ BY BHARAT SIKKA, ON TILL MARCH 21, 2021
NATURE MORTE is pleased to present Bharat Sikka’s series of photographs titled THE SAPPER on view at their Dhan Mill gallery through 21st March 2021.
‘The Sapper’ is as multi-layered as the relationship that it narrates between a father and an adult son.
Through photography, Sikka creates the possibilities for observation, recollection, close comparison, and collaboration, and gives this long-term project a title that both describes and believes its substance.
The Sapper is an entitling that offers up a cue for the viewer: an explanation of the circumstances, behaviours and predilections that we can read into the portrayal of this former “sapper” of the Indian Army Corps of Engineers. It suggests a double-edged understanding of this father—the push and pull of his sense of selfhood—as both held in his public, now-historical role, and despite of it.
The Sapper is also disarming in its descriptive simplicity and thus creates an entry point into Sikka’s intimate renderings of what is mirrored within, and passes between, this photographer-son and father.
Throughout Sikka’s constellation of photographs and photographic objects is the concentrated presence of deeply human tendencies to assemble and order things. With true familiarity, Sikka captures the manifestations of his father’s methods of being, ranging from his almost incidental and unconscious daily actions through to the traces (the “what-is-left”) of engineering projects and ambitious creative intentions that have fallen wide.
The Sapper is a story of companionship with neither the patriarch nor the photographer commanding superiority over the other. Sikka finds these visual signifiers from within the close proximity of his encounters with his father–amplifying, annotating and re-enacting them through his own photographic ordering and assembling.
THE SAPPER will be on view at the NATURE MORTE, Dhan Mill gallery, from 20th of February till the 21st of March 2021.
