Exhibitions

Time & Time Again: Jyoti Bhatt

An exhibition showcasing Jyoti Bhatt’s photographic works. Be it his iconic portraits of famous Indian artists, his invaluable documents of Indian rural and traditional village life, or his modernist and experimental photographs which redefined the possibilities of the medium, this exhibition celebrates the breadth of his practice, whilst shining new light and scholarship on a much loved artist. The project is being accompanied by a new book on Bhatt’s work as a photographer, with essays contributed by many of the leading voices in Indian art history and academia.

Through his work with photography, Bhatt did much to challenge the labels that in the past have held certain artforms, and the people who create them, as superior to others. In Bhatt’s world, modern (urban) and rural (traditional) artists, ‘fine artists’ and ’popular artists’, painters and photographers, are all equal.

With its shared inclusive and multidisciplinary vision for the arts, MAP is delighted to be presenting the first museum retrospective of Jyoti Bhatt’s photographic works, drawn from an archive of over 7,000 prints and 10,000 negatives, which are presented alongside other mediums and material from the MAP collection and across three interrelated sections – his portraits of artists in and around Baroda, his studies of rural and folk art forms and communities, and his own more experimental photographs, which all push at the boundaries of what we expect a photograph to be.

Installation view of Time & Time Again at MAP, Bengaluru