Coming home to school

In works of art, contexts are important and so is the treatment. Dileep Prakash’s work on Anglo-Indians (2004-2006) gave us the measure of his ‘gaze.’ It told us a few things — that he had chosen what he would reveal through his pictures, the distance at which he would stand from his subjects and why. His recent work on 19 boarding schools is no different.

Triggered by a desire to revisit his alma mater, Mayo College in Ajmer, it’s a collection of frames where Prakash has taken himself off the equation to present a universal continuum of what (other) boarding schools that have got to be home, look like on recall — deep, dark corridors, empty rooms, walls marked with bursts of childish graffiti, rows of toothbrushes, the wetness of wash basins, and most of all, like somebody else’s life.

‘What was Home’ is on view till

May 28. At Photoink, 1 Jhandewalan Faiz Road. Ph: 28755940/41/42