Atul Bhalla - Under the Influence New York Monday, March 31, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Exhibited


    Frankfurt, Fotographie Forum Frankfurt, Watching Me-Watching India: New Photography from India, 2006; New Jersey, Newark Museum, India: Public Places/Private Spaces, September 2006-January 2007; New Delhi, Anant Art, Immersions: Atul Bhalla, 2007   

  • Literature

    G. Sinha & P. Sternberger, eds., India Public Places/Private Spaces, Newark 2007, pp. 124-127 (another example illustrated; another example illustrated again as the front cover)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Atul Bhalla addresses the changing natural landscape of his native New Delhi in his work. His photographs, which seek to document the effects of industrialization and overpopulation, focus on the iconography of the Yamuna river, one of Northern India’s most prominent waterways. In this work, Bhalla photographs himself in a series of 14 images, slowly and serenely sinking into the river. As the title I was not waiving but drowning suggests, the work takes on the conflating characteristics of both baptism and suicide, birth and death, and purification and contamination. India’s rivers have long had religious significance in purifying and healing those that bathe in them. However, with overcrowding and immense poverty they have also become incredibly polluted and sites of disease. Bhalla seeks to explore the role of nature in the contemporary South Asian society and evaluates the forces at work in shaping both the environment and the future of its people.

270

Fourteen Works: I was not waving but drowning - II

2005
Digital print on archival paper.
12 x 18 in. (30.5 x 45.7 cm) each.
Each print signed in Hindi on front lower right.  This work is from an edition of five.    

Estimate
$15,000 - 20,000 

Sold for $18,750

Under the Influence

31 Mar 2008, 10am & 2pm
New York