Just Wide Enough To Hold The Weight

Marvel Harris, Siddhartha Hajra, Soumya Sankar Bose

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.

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.

Soumya Sankar Bose is a photographer from Bengal, India. He graduated from the one-year diploma programme 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 Photo Book Awards 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 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 Photos Joop Swart Masterclass.

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. 

Press & Reviews

These portraits explore how it feels to inhabit a queer body

Just Wide Enough To Hold The Weight is the group show reaching out across the ‘abyss of otherness.’
– Emily Dinsdale

An exhibition in New York explores gender identity

From Baxter St until June 8, Just Wide Enough to Hold the Weight will be open to visitors, a collective of three international artists who establish a transversal dialogue that focuses on the narration of queer bodies.

– Eugenio Gianetta