Your first stop is the Chowmahalla Palace, you then head out to Laad Bazaar, take in the sights, sounds and smells, then go straight to the Sardar Mahal and then make your way back to the 100-year-old Nimrah Café. Your schedule for the photo-exhibition Dialect and Dialogue —In the streets of Hyderabad is set.
Bringing art out of galleries and splashing it all over the city is artist and gallery owner Avani Rao Gandra’s forte. This time, with this exhibition that is part of the Indian Photography Festival, Avani is taking on the gallis of the Old City with photographs she curated.
Photograph by Saurabh Chatterjee
“Art has become elitist as it is only displayed at galleries and is widely disconnected from people. So the best way to bring art and people together is by taking art to them,” explains Avani.
Photograph by K Ramesh Babu
For this show, each viewer is given a map to the exhibition and as they follow it, photographs will slowly show up on shutters of shops, across pillars and inside the café. The show is spread across one kilometre and has three clusters. “The show starts from Chowmahalla and ends at the Nimrah Café. At the Chowmahalla, we have 15 photos on display, then we have nine photographs across the stretch from Laad Bazaar to Nimrah, and the third cluster at the Sardar Mahal has six photos,” she says.
On the Laad Bazaar-Nimrah stretch, photographs are displayed on closed shutters of shops and inside the cafe too and the photos are either a stark contrast of the place or complement the area. “We have chosen a few shops that have two shutters. One of the shops is a spice shop, where a blow up of a poor man eating a bread is placed, then on an embroidery workshop store shutter, we have used the photo of a weaver. We don’t just have sights, but the smell from the spice shop, the hullabaloo of the area... everything just adds to the experience,” says Avani, adding that 28 photographers have shared their work. “It’s not just a romantic version of the city. We have covered everything from riots, people, festivals and more,” she says. However, there were challenges. First, the rains, following which the event was postponed to October 3. Later, the sanctions.
Avani Rao Gandra
She says, “While we managed to get permission to display work at Sardar Mahal (a heritage building which is currently the office of zonal GHMC commissioner), we couldn’t get a nod for displaying at the Charminar.”
