India’s Gauri Gill has won the prestigious $50,000 Grange Prize for excellence in photography. The New Delhi-based photographer was lauded for her work that looks to address ordinary heroism within challenging environments.
The Grange Prize, started in 2008 by the AGO & Aeroplan, aims at fostering both development and appreciation of contemporary photography. Four talented photographers are chosen as nominees each year by the elite jury members. This year the finalists were chosen by Michelle Jacques, AGO acting curator of Canadian art; Wayne Baerwaldt of Alberta College of Art + Design; photographer/ writer/ curator Sunil Gupta as well as Delhi-based critic/ curator Gayatri Sinha.
The only major Canadian art award selected on basis of public vote had over 12,000 people casting their votes online and at a polling station at a gallery of Ontario where the nominees’ works were on view. Gill prevailed over the other three finalists to take the award. The other finalists were Vancouver-based Althea Thauberger Winnipeg native Elaine Stocki and Nandini Valli of Chennai. Each of the finalists has been awarded an international residency. While Gill and Valli were as artists-in-residence at the AGO in Toronto for three weeks earlier this year, Stocki and Thauberger are likely to visit India next year.
Having studied at Parsons School of Design, New York and California’s Stanford University, she works in the documentary tradition. While the artist has taken photos of Indo-Americans in diverse locales like Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., Gill is perhaps more renowned for her decades-long exploration of issues related to marginalized people of India’s desert state, Rajasthan.
In a video that accompanied her AGO exhibition, the artist stated that she opted for photography as an art form since it can serve as a powerful medium “to take you out into the real world’ and can well be ‘deeply personal.’ In an unequal world, it has the kind of reach and power to let individuals offer their personal interpretations’ and analyze their stature.
The Grange Prize exhibition was recently on view at the AGO . Works by the finalists can be viewed at www.thegrangeprize.com.
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