Over four decades, photographer Sunil Gupta has created projects united by the individual and collective need for the right to freedom, to be seen and therefore recognized, focusing on racial issues, migration, queer identity and its struggles. often investigated through the use of portraits and self-portraits. His first Italian solo show is hosted at the Matèria gallery in Rome until January 15, Emerge into light, which focuses on two series by the author, Christopher street e From here to eternity.
Christopher street is a street in Greenwich village in New York where the Stonewall Inn is located, the gay bar where the militant homosexual liberation movement took shape in 1969. Sunil, who grew up in New Delhi and then emigrated with his family to Canada, arrived in the city in 1976, at the age of 23, involuntarily intercepting the perfect moment: after the Stonewall riots and just before the dramatic spread of AIDS. There was joy and pride in the air and the streets of that particular neighborhood were constantly filled with “happy and promiscuous” young men, as the artist himself writes.
In 1976 a new opening and unprecedented acceptance filled the alleys of New York: it was time to go out to “go to the street” but also to “come out”. In a recent interview released on the occasion of the retrospective of his works at the Photographer’s Gallery in London, he states that “it was the moment when there were too many men and not enough time. We wanted to have sex all the time and by doing it, we were fighting against the traditional idea of family and the accumulation of wealth. So I started photographing them so I could have them all, without really having to stop and have sex with each of them. ”
Above all, it was also a way to identify with them, find similar people and create a sense of community by broadening the meaning of “family”.
In the course of his life, the need for freedom, always supported by photographic practice, evolves and becomes a beacon towards which to aim to illuminate the darkest period: that of illness. From here to eternity is the title of a first project from 1999, conceived after the diagnosis of HIV positivity.
Made up of diptychs of personal portraits and areas of London, the original project “is an interpretation of the disease and its effects, a map of my changing local context. London as a focal point of attitudes towards survivors and their care, ”says Sunil. In 2020 From here to eternity becomes a new project, which intersects the previous one and expands it: a dilated diary form that moves back and forth in time, to tell what the years of illness and survival were, which allowed the photographer to find a way to emerged from the virus with a new sense of purpose and faith in the future.
An exhibition that arrives in Italy at a particular historical moment for the issue of lgbtq + rights and which in perspective can also symbolically assume an additional relevance: from negative to positive, preserving the hope of emerging towards the light.
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