Arty Jaunts

On Sunday,as Culmann,39,opened the exhibition “TV-Viewers” at Alliance Francaise,he said,“Europe is not the place for me,it is gloomy and lacks movement. There’s something about the culture of India that makes you want to explore,” he says. Culmann,who is here with his wife Delphine,has already planned his next India project. He would pose in small,dingy studios across the country to create a series of autoportraits that will also unobtrusively document the places where India’s albums are formed. “Photographers come here to shoot the stark poverty or the new images of shining India. I am trying to enter India through another window that would give me a peek into its pictorial culture,” he says.

Culmann is one of the few artists who have made Delhi their studio. Australian conceptual artist Alana Hunt,25,is another. After one of her professors at Sydney College of the Arts,spoke effusively about India,the art student left her home and landed at a freezing New Delhi airport in January 2008. She joined the Sarai Media Lab,a non-profit organisation of artists,and began working on an ambitious street installation. She would take pictures of people — workmates,entire families and strangers — on two-wheelers and then display them on the very streets where she photographed. “The idea of more than two people driving on bikes and whirring through the city is at once exciting and dangerous. While the law bans more than two people from riding on two-wheelers,it seems to offer a rare physical intimacy and freedom,” says Hunt,who has also enrolled at JNU’s School of Arts and Aesthetics. At the university and outside,she has gone beyond India 101.

Photographer Sephi Bergerson moved to Delhi from Tel Aviv in 2002. After seven long years,the 44-year-old has finally tasted fame with the publication of his book on Indian street food. Now he flits from one mandap to another,as he documents Indian weddings. Meanwhile,his coffee-table book on Indian trucks — Horn Please: Trucking in India — shot in Punjab,Kerala,Rajasthan,Orissa and Kashmir,is being readied for release early next year.

“What I do in Delhi is completely different from what I did in Israel. Here I initiate my own projects,be it books or long-term documentary projects,which wouldn’t have been possible while living in Israel. Here,the economy is booming,” says Bergerson,who worked as a commercial photographer in Israel before moving to Delhi. And he is loving it here,as the city fits into his viewfinder.