Description
Jatin Gulati [b.1992, India] is an artist working across photography, drawing and text, whose practice explores how dominant narratives are sustained through images, systems and structures of authority. With a background in both architecture and photography, he tests the limits of the photographic image, drawing on the domestic setting, in particular the figure of the patriarch and his family’s post-Partition archive, while extending into colonial histories and postcolonial conditions in independent India. In 2025 his work received the Lucie Foundation Emerging Fine Art Award and the Experimenter Generator Grant, was shortlisted for the PhMuseum Photography Grant, and was screened at Fotofestiwal, Kranj Foto Fest and Verzasca Foto Festival. He recently completed PhMuseum’s eight-month IDEA Masterclass with Adam Broomberg on a scholarship, and teaches in the Contemporary Arts Practice programme at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bengaluru, where he is based. In Effigy of Man (2023–ongoing), Gulati turns to the photographs of his late grandfather, still regarded a decade after his death as the image of a revered and often feared patriarch. Strict, short-tempered and orthodox, his grandfather’s persona was shaped by the Partition of British India in 1947, when at a young age he was displaced from Multan, now in Pakistan, to Haryana. Through studio portraiture and collage, Gulati re-stages and reconfigures these images, using the studio as both a performative space and a domestic interior in which he embodies fragments of his grandfather’s photographed body. The work confronts the dominant representations of masculinity held within family archives and makes room for vulnerability and alternative masculinities. Winner | OD Photo Prize 2026
