Fotomuseum Winterthur | Saturday, 12.06. – Sunday, 22.08.2010

Where Three Dreams Cross – 150 Years of Photography in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

Histories of photography, as presented through books or exhibitions in the twentieth century, have been dominated by Europe and the United States. The exhibition Where Three Dreams Cross – 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh and the publication accompanying it articulate the untold story of an equally significant history, as rich and as formally innovative, yet embedded in the culture and politics of South Asia. It does not reiterate a western view of the east, but celebrates how successive generations of photographers from the subcontinent have portrayed themselves and their eras. An inside view is presented.

Where Three Dreams Cross spans the transition of the South Asian peninsula – once defined as “the immense rhomboid” bordered by the Himalayas in the north and the ocean to the south – from a heterogeneous yet single entity defined by the Indus river to its subdivision into three nations: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The fast time of political upheaval and technology and the slow time of family, culture and ritual are captured through the lens of some 80 artists. Their work also demonstrates formal experimentation and aesthetic lines of enquiry that are indigenous yet of universal interest.

The exhibition focuses on five thematics: The Portrait, The Performance, The Family, The Public Space and The Body Politic. Thus it captures the intimate as well as the theatrical aspects of human life, the hierarchies that structure society as well as the chaos, the tangle of colours, people, traffic and cinematic images on the South-Asian continent.

The exhibition was curated by Sunil Gupta, Radhika Singh, Hammad Nasar, and Shahidul Alam. A cooperation with the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Main sponsors: BTS Investment Advisors and Volkart Stiftung