Edition 2007
Sunil GUPTA
Born in 1953 in New Delhi, India.
Lives in London.
Lives in London.
As an artist, curator, writer, and cultural activist, Sunil Gupta challenges stereotypes and questions beliefs, by exploring issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and related issues of access, place, and identity. Gupta emigrated with his family from India to Montreal when he was a teenager. He earned an MA at the Royal College of Art in London, England, in 1983, and was based there until 2005, when he moved to India to pursue artistic projects. He was diagnosed HIV positive in 1995. In 1988, he co-founded Autograph: the Association of Black Photographers, a publicly funded coalition of photographers of Asian and African descent. In 1992, he started OVA: the Organization for Visual Arts, a curatorial company dedicated to promoting a new internationalism in the production and consumption of art. Gupta’s photographs are autobiographical, drawing on his experiences as a gay man of colour living with HIV who moves fluidly within the landscapes, traditions, and cultures of his native India, and his adopted homes in Canada and England. The colour and narrative of the Bollywood films of Gupta’s childhood inform his photographs, which are usually presented in series. Images are combined with text or with other images, sometimes digitally, as in Homelands. His work has a characteristic insight and subtle humour. Gupta is currently working on a series about his ancestral home called Country, inspired by Paul Strand's book on an Italian village. In 2000, Sunil Gupta received a Creative and Performing Arts Research Fellowship from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, which culminated in the book and photo and video exhibition Pictures From Here. A selection of his last exhibitions: 2012 Sun City & Other Stories Alliance Francaise Gallery, New Delhi; 2010 The New Pre-Raphaelites, Grosvenor Vadehra, London; 2009 Love, Undetectable, Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi; 2009 Imagining Childhood, Sepia, New York; 2009 Mr Malhotra's Party, Stephen Bulger, Toronto...