PAST CONVERSATION

Phalguni Guliani, Marvel Harris, Siddhartha Hajra, and Drew Sawyer

Date:
May 25, 2022

PAST CONVERSATION

Phalguni Guliani, Marvel Harris, Siddhartha Hajra, and Drew Sawyer

To commemorate Marvel Harris, Siddhartha Hajra, and Soumya Sankar Bose’s exhibition Just Wide Enough to Hold the Weight, curated by Phalguni Guliani, Baxter St is pleased to host a virtual conversation between artists, Marvel Harris and Siddhartha Hajra, curator Phalguni Guliani, and art historian and curator, Drew Sawyer on May 25th, at 11 AM ET. Just Wide Enough to Hold the Weight is on view through June 8th at 126 Baxter St.

Just Wide Enough to Hold the Weight questions what happens when someone has the agency to tell their own story. This is signposted by the text framing the exhibition entrance, a passage from Ocean Vuong’s essay The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation: “I still have my body and with it these words, hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living. I want to use it to talk about my obsessions and fears, my odd and idiosyncratic joys…” Visitors are invited to consider the works on view through these words.

This exhibition is part of Baxter St’s Guest-Curated Program and is made possible with the support of the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.

About Drew Sawyer

Drew Sawyer is an art historian and a curator, who holds the title of the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator at the Brooklyn Museum. He has previously held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Columbus Museum of Art, where he co-founded the Center for Art and Social Engagement (CASE) through a major grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. He received a 2020 Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. Sawyer holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University, focusing on North American art and photography and their intersections with social histories around class, race, gender, and sexuality. He is a regular contributor to scholarly volumes, exhibition catalogues, journals, and magazines.

About Phalguni Guliani

Phalguni Guliani is an exhibition-maker based in New Delhi, India. She is interested in the inner lives of women and of quotidian objects, seeking to explore these through a practice that pirouettes between writing and contemporary curatorial art. Her latest exhibitions include Vermont Studio Center, Vermont (2022); The Clemente, New York (2022); and Mumbai Art Room, India (2021). She was awarded the Bianca Patton Fellowship for Young Women Writers (2019) to attend India’s leading residency for writers – Sangam House, and was invited to the Canserrat Residency in El Bruc, Spain (2018). Her texts have appeared in Frieze, Ocula, and the Indian Quarterly magazine among others. 

About Marvel Harris

Marvel Harris is a photographer born and raised in the Netherlands. Marvel’s photographic work revolves around his experiences as an autistic, non-binary transgender artist who has struggled with mental health problems for many years. Marvel graduated from the University of Applied Photography in Apeldoorn in 2018. Marvel has since won several prizes with his work, including the 1st prize of the prestigious Zilveren Camera in the documentary category (2018), and was selected by LensCulture as one of the Emerging Talents (2019), and by Foam as one of the Foam Talents (2022). Marvel’s work is shown both in the Netherlands and abroad at fairs and exhibitions, such as Melkweg Expo (Amsterdam), World Press Photo Exhibition (Rotterdam), Museum Hilversum, Paris Photo, Musea Zutphen, and Webber Gallery (London). In 2020, Marvel self-published the photo book MARVEL. The book won MACK’s First Book Award and got republished in 2021.

About Siddhartha Hajra

Siddhartha Hajra calls himself an instinctual maker of photographs, capturing life as it unfolds before his eyes. For over a decade, he has chronicled the cities of India and those who occupy the margins of it. In this time, he has both attended and facilitated photo workshops with Michael Akerman, Jonathan Torgovnik, and gender collectives in Calcutta. Siddhartha’s expertise lies in capturing the work of international aid organizations with the sensitivity of his training as an erstwhile Professor of Sociology. He currently works as a documentary photographer with UNICEF and has published with the likes of BBC, Human Rights Watch, and National Geographic. 

About Soumya Sankar Bose

Soumya Sankar Bose is a photographer from Bengal, India. He graduated from the one-year diploma program at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka. In his practice, Soumya uses photography, archival material, text, and film to explore desire, identity, and memory. His first book Where the Birds Never Sing (2020) on the Marichjhapi massacre, the forcible eviction in 1979 of lower caste Bengali refugees on Marichjhapi Island in Sundarban, India, and the subsequent death of thousands by police gunfire, starvation, and disease; was shortlisted for the First PhotoBook Award in the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award in 2020. Soumya was awarded Magnum Foundation’s Social Justice fellowship for his Full Moon on a Dark Night project. His other projects are also a recipient of the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art’s Amol Vadehra Art Grant, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan’s Five Million Incidents, Henry Luce Foundation’s grant, and India Foundation for the Arts grant. In 2019, he was one of the recipients of World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass.

Date:
May 25, 2022