Looking Back: In the Bazaar

This talk will be a conversation with 2024 Danny Wilson Memorial Award Winners for their project In the Bazaar.

The project included photographic works by Kamal Badhey and Gurnoor Singh. It was a conversation between two photographers and their long term projects Portals and Passageways and Life at Chawri, geographically located in bazaars of India in Delhi and Hyderabad. Looking back at the curation of the project, it explored how collaboration can build community through everyday encounters with art. Working closely with shop owners of Guru Foods in the Open Market, the exhibition became part of the life of the market through ongoing conversations, shared decision-making, and relationship-building. Rather than placing artwork in a traditional gallery, photographs were integrated throughout the shop, among spices, on refrigerators, and above cashiers, allowing people to encounter them while going about their daily routines. This approach considered both sellers and customers, creating unexpected moments of engagement within a familiar space of commerce.

The content of this collective project spoke both with and back to the idea of the bazaar as a place of chaos. Instead, the photographers’ intentions were to make sense of the places of commerce, community, and activity through the camera. Coming from two different parts of India, both the projects show continuity in the contemporary urban landscapes and the echoes of empire and colonial regimes. Though India, which has one of the most diverse sets of traditions and cultures, the Northern and Southern regions are commonly a subject of comparison. In the Bazaar showcases elements of visual coherence of the regions, further pronounced through the content and curation in the shop. Kamal’s project Portals and Passageways engages in acts of reclamation through encounters with ancestral spaces, while Gurnoor’s Life at Chawri focuses on life on the streets of the marketplace. The themes of both projects juxtaposes the interior and exterior of life in the bazaar.

The display of the photographs connected a wide range of people, from regular shoppers and neighbouring traders to the passers-by. Community gatherings around chai and food further encouraged conversation and connection during the Photo Fringe festival. The community the project built allowed it to be extended beyond the Photo Fringe festival’s exhibition period, with the work remaining in the shop and becoming part of its everyday environment showing how collaborative, community-based exhibitions bring photography to audiences who may not traditionally engage with gallery spaces, making the artwork accessible and part of the rhythms of the market.

Kamal Badhey
Kamal Badhey is a photographer, educator, and documentarian whose work intersects with ideas of dispersal, diaspora and origin pilgrimages, using photography and the narratives of living and ‘deceased’ spaces and objects to stitch together stories. She has many years of experience collaborating with youth and adults in art education, teaching in public schools, transitional housing, community centers, civic engagement, and universities. In 2016-2017 she was awarded the Lewis Hine Fellowship at the Center for Documentary Studies and the Claremont Documentary Project Fellowship. Alongside her work in the community, Kamal also works as an artist in the research space, uncovering oral histories alongside family photographs. She is currently pursuing doctoral research focusing on Punjabi immigrant communities of Wolverhampton at the University of Brighton, working alongside the Apna Heritage Archive created by photographer Anand Chhabra.

Gurnoor Singh
I am a curator, artist, and gallery professional, working between India and the UK. I have worked with ONCA Gallery in Brighton and The Willesden Gallery, where I trained as a curator. My experience includes supporting artists, assisting with art projects, and planning and curating exhibitions. I have worked on 9 curatorial projects across India and the UK, including my two solo curation projects. I love to experiment with materiality and have worked on various media, including fabrics, sculptures, prints, archival artifacts, and photographs.

As an artist, I have exhibited my work in the UK and India, with features in multiple photobooks and magazines. In 2024, I was awarded the Danny Wilson Memorial Award for Professionals’ Choice for Emerging Photography at Photo Fringe. My practice explores themes of memory, place, and human connections. My process is based on observations and automatism. I love to work with single images as well as collages and composites, using my own photographs as well as archival and found photography.

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Image credit: Soham Joshi