Paris based Duboys Gallery presents ‘This Is Not That’

Binu Bhaskar, Fabien Charuau, Neil Chowdhury, Pradeep Dalal, Dhruv Dhawan, Soham Gupta, Swapan Parekh, Zubin Pastakia, Brijesh Patel and Mahesh Shantaram are the photographers who feature in a group show at Gallery Duboys. It's a new contemporary art venue located in the core art quarter of Paris.

The show at the innovative art space is its curators’ reading of what’s exactly happening on Indian photography scene right now. It’s an exercise that involves putting together photo artists who are intimately engaged with their themes and subjects, in a transparent reflection of how life in the country engages the people.

The participating artists are all linked together by their deft handling of reality and acute empathy for their subject matter. A curatorial note elaborates: “This is a precise photographic approach where they probe reality as a fragment of a much larger and highly complex whole. Instead of recording what’s perceived as real, this approach is rather a preoccupation with the twisting, and the subsequent testing of today’s so-called reality. It is a vision shaped by a certain mode of looking at the world, which tends to take partial reality for granted.”

‘This Is Not That = what is true hidden under multiple layers of illusion...’ is how the spirit of this photography show can be summed up. Underlining the premise of the show, an accompanying note explains, “It’s rooted in a photographic approach wherein the artist happens to probe reality in-depth. Rather than an effort to reproduce what the eye gets to see, the artists begin with no set rules, exploring things in a subjective way.

According to Fabien Charuau, the exhibit gives the participating artists an opportunity to move away from the diktats that have been imposed by curators mostly outside India, who attempt to make peculiar Indian offerings fit the long-standing clichés and stereotypes. Simultaneously, Paris based Centre Pompidou is hosting a major show of contemporary Indian art.