Description
Part of the first rank of a creative ‘migrant’ generation which became increasingly visible on the global visual art scene in the 1980s, Sunil Gupta welds together a new language of aesthetics, art, and politics in his work. Wish You Were Here is more than just a memoir of a life. It is a journey through creating a new visual vocabulary that transformed words like diaspora, sexuality, sex, migration, home, AIDS, and disease into images that revealed and provoked other ways of seeing and understanding. Documenting how the intimate and the personal became political in places as different and as similar as Delhi, London, San Francisco and Tilonia, it is a fiercely contemporary work which will define new directions in Indian visual art as well as in ongoing debates about difference and sexuality.
ISBN: 978-8190666800
Sunil Gupta (born in New Delhi in 1953) is a photographer, curator, writer, and activist. Gupta migrated to Canada at the age of fifteen. He was educated in photography at the New School, New York (1976) and the Royal College of Art, London (1983). Over a career spanning more than four decades, Gupta has maintained a visionary approach to photography, producing bodies of work that are pioneering in their social and political commentary. The artist’s diasporic experience of multiple cultures informs a practice dedicated to themes of race, migration, and queer identity–his own lived experience was a point of departure for photographic projects, born from a desire to see himself and others like him represented in art history. Gupta’s work has been exhibited internationally and published in numerous monographs and catalogues, including Christopher Street, 1976 (2018) and From Here to Eternity (2020).
