Karen Knorr India Song

Description

Over an established career, Karen Knorr's work has developed a critical and playful dialogue with documentary photography through the use of different visual and textual strategies. Her aim is to explore everyday subjects such as family, lifestyle, culture and animal life to subsequently stage them in very unusual contexts. She uses colour to investigate issues of connoisseurship, heritage, and art through staged events in architectural interiors. The use of text and captioning appears as a device to slow down the consumption of images and to comment on received ideas about fine arts in museum culture. These strategies appear in her photographs with digital collages of animals and objects in a variety of architectural interiors. Karen Knorr began the India Song series in 2008, after a life-changing trip to India. These latest images, which draw inspiration from the Indian tradition of personifying animals in literature and art, create scenarios that are at once otherworldly and surreal.

Author description

William Dalrymple is an acclaimed British historian and writer, broadcaster, and critic. He is the author of nine books about India and the Islamic world, including "City of Djinns," "White Mughals," "The Last Mughal," "and Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India." Rosa Maria Falvo is a writer, editor, and curator, specializing in Asian contemporary art and photography. She regularly travels the Subcontinent and recently curated 'Lifeblood', an exhibition of seven leading photographers in Bangladesh at the Dhaka Art Summit. Christopher Pinney is professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College, London. His research interests cover the art and visual culture of South Asia, with a particular focus on the history of photography and chromolithography in India.