Kaamna Patel

Kaamna Patel is a Mumbai-based visual artist and bookmaker. After graduating with a degree in English Literature, she began her career as an assistant to fashion photographer Farrokh Chothia. In 2010, she received a scholarship to study photography at the Parsons Paris College of Art, for whom she is currently the ambassador in Asia, Australia and the Middle East. In 2019, she launched her publishing imprint JOJO. This grant enables Kaamna to create a body of still images that explore notions of nostalgia, temporality, hyperreality and alienation in the age of technology and the internet. 

The current project is part of an ongoing body of work titled Take a Picture which Kaamna is making in collaboration with her mother, where they are taking the Covid-19 lockdown as an opportunity to visually simulate travel to the mother’s dream destinations. For this project, Kaamna focuses on a tour itinerary of seven days for Japan that was provided for her mother by a travel agency which was about to shut down as a result of the pandemic. Using multiple visual devices - images from her mother’s archives, screenshots from Google street view, desktop wallpapers found on the internet, and images captured through the laptop computer’s lens - the visual simulations will be created on Zoom using the programme’s virtual background feature.

Kaamna notes how the industry, connectivity and media have turned landscapes into hyperreal objects of desire. Experiences are turned into commodities, and portraits into performances, to be communicated to a virtually omnipresent audience via social media. The emergent pool of homogenous imagery creates templates for the industry to ‘tailor-make’ experiences. When these images breakdown the illusion is broken. It is on one level a performance and on another a documentation - both of our predicament and the present state of technology.

The outcome of this project will be a set of still images that will eventually be presented on a website or in the form of a video. These images will go on to become part of the larger project Take a Picture, which is envisioned as an artist book that explores the periphery of photography as documentation, through experimentation, playfulness and new perspectives; and an Augmented Reality experience. Kaamna’s deliverables to IFA will be the set of still images created as part of this project. 

This grant is made possible under the special initiative 25x25, with support from lead donor Kshirsagar-Apte Foundation, and philanthropy partners, Titan Company Limited, Priya Paul, and Sethu Vaidyanathan.