Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University for the Creative Arts
India Song, digital photographic series, monograph
India Song consists of 50 digital photographs taken between 2008 and 2013, 32 of which are presented in the book India Song Karen Knorr (2013). The series uses large-format digital photography to consider men's space (mardana) and women's space (zanana) in Mughal and Rajput palace architecture, havelis and mausoleums.
Since 2008 I have been exploring power through a focus on the upper caste culture of the Rajput in India and its relationship to the ‘other’. This project develops from my work exploring woman’s space, animality and myth represented in the painted murals of Mughal and Rajput architecture in Rajasthan: it extends the exploration to Hindu temples and mausoleums. To create the images in this series, interiors were photographed with a large format Sinar P3 analogue camera and scanned to very high resolution. Live animals were inserted into the images of architectural sites, fusing high resolution digital with analogue photography. Animals photographed in sanctuaries, zoos and cities are pictured inhabiting palaces, mausoleums, temples and holy sites, provoking an interrogation of Indian cultural heritage and rigid hierarchies. Cranes, zebus, langurs, tigers and elephants appear to mutate from princely pets to avatars of past feminine historic characters, blurring boundaries between reality and illusion and reinventing the Panchatantra for the 21st century.
This work develops and extends the allegorical approach in my previous work Fables, to consider caste and woman’s space in Northern Indian architectural space. The project challenges conventional travel and ethnographic photographies, and their depictions of the ‘other’. My research into the syncretic nature of Indian heritage aims to highlight the complexity and contradictions in Hindu caste culture, in order to counter reductive Asian stereotypes.
The work was awarded the V International Photography Pilar Citoler Prize in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2011 and 2012.
