Art returns to the walls, galleries not just yet

An aerial view of an empty Connaught Place, which is part of Present Absent, an ongoing photo exhibition showing famous landmarks in Delhi and Italian cities during lockdown.

 With not a soul in sight, the intricate jaali work of an elegant building and the obtrusive overhead power cables running by it seemed to be in perfect harmony with each other.

On a normal day in the bustling Old Delhi—where the photograph was taken during the lockdown—the ugly electricity cables would be a part of the daily chaos in a crowded street below. But the absence of human beings and their activities appear to have brought to life an exuding certainty of those present.

Present Absent, an ongoing India-Italy photography exhibition in Delhi, has nine photographs of Delhi and 18 from famous squares in Italy taken during lockdown. With art shows now restricted to the online space, Present Absent rings a different tune. The entire exhibition is mounted on the walls and meant for visitors.

"It is like giving a sign of hope for the future," says Andrea Baldi, director of Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, which houses the show on the walls of the porch outside its permanent gallery. "This is a period when nothing happens live. Therefore, we have opened something for the public to visit," Baldi adds.

A picture of the deserted Barshabulla area in Old Delhi by Parul Sharma. Nine of Sharma’s works are part of the Present Absent photo exhibition that is on in Delhi and is open for visitors.

Only two visitors or four from the same household are allowed to the exhibition that runs up to December 10. "We wanted to show how the cities were in that period when everybody was indoors," says Baldi.

The last exhibition at the Italian Cultural Centre was an all-women show by three Indians and three Italians that opened at the end of January. "It was on until we closed for the lockdown," the director adds.

All the nine works from India in Present Absent are by Delhi-based photographer Parul Sharma. Images from Old Delhi, India Gate, Raisina Hills, Connaught Place and Mehrauli form the India element, while all the 18 works from Italy are shot by different photographers.

Parul Sharma with Andrea Baldi, director of Italian Embassy Cultural Centre in Delhi.

"I started taking the pictures in the first week of April," says Sharma, who shot more than 10,000 photographs of Delhi using her iPhone 11 Pro. "There was nobody in the streets except frontline workers and journalists. I took pictures of the beautiful architecture of Delhi— Mughal, colonial and post-Independence," she adds.

A picture of India Gate shows a flock of birds in the sky with a police vehicle parked on a deserted road. Another of Connaught Place shows its majestic white pillars standing tall in the emptiness of a massive corridor, while an aerial view of the major Lutyens landmark has a lone cyclist amid stony desolation.

"I had to do some serious lobbying with the guard at The Statesman building (in Connaught Place) to let him allow me to click pictures from the top," says Sharma, whose first photography exhibition, Mystic India on the Kumbh Mela, was mounted at the Marino Marini museum in Florence last December. "The guard thought I had come to jump from the building and he waited with me until I had finished," she laughs.

The photographs of the Italian squares are part of an original project conceived by Marco Delogu, director of the Fotografia festival in Rome.

Eighteen of the 21 original works by Italian photographers are part of Present Absent. All the photographs bear texts by Italian writers, among them Jhumpa Lahiri, who lives in Rome.

The picture of Santa Maria Square in Trastevere, Rome is rendered in words by Jhumpa Lahiri.

"Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome in 2011 and started learning Italian," says Baldi. "Since then she has published many works in Italian," he adds. Lahiri renders in words the picture of the Santa Maria Square in Trastevere, Rome by photographer Flavio Scollo, which is lined by one of the oldest churches in the city.

"Although I'm always moving when I'm in this piazza (square), I can also imagine myself still, in the exact spot of the photographer," writes Lahiri.

Referring to the framed picture of an old lady in the window of a building in the square, the Indian-origin writer continues, "What will she think of the weeds— from the photo, I can't tell whether they're grass or a kind of moss—growing between the cobblestones? Will their unfamiliar presence make her think of the absence of everything?"

The famous San Marco square of Venice during lockdown.

Helena Janeczek, who won Italy's top literary award, the Strega Prize, for her 2018 novel The Girl with the Leica, provides words the picture of Milan's Cathedral square by Luca Campigotto. "Now that it's not needed as the background for a selfie, a starting point for a shopping expedition, or a meeting place, now that Milan is at a standstill, its cathedral reveals the sense of a design that we passers-by or visitors, out-of-towners or Milanese, were never able to grasp in our bustling insignificance," writes Janeczek.

Sharma, whose photographs on Delhi is now published as a book, Dialects of Silence-Delhi Under Lockdown by Roli Books, believes the images can serve as a reminder of "the times that we have gone through".

Among her works at the India-Italy exhibition are views of the airport, a national highway and the Qutab Minar during the lockdown. In Old Delhi, where her mother was born, Sharma was shocked by the silence. "I don't think anyone could have imagined Old Delhi's streets without people," she says.

"From the empty vistas of Raisina Hills to the solitary columns of Connaught Place, from the mournful monuments of Old Delhi to the eerie quietness of Khan Market, what I saw was the frozen reality of the life we had left behind while hiding from the virus," she writes in her book. "Art can serve as a memory."

(Faizal Khan curated India’s first football films festival with artist Riyas Komu at the 2011 International Film Festival of India, Goa. He was the curator of a football films programme in the Artists Cinema section of the second Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014.)