Jatin Gulati
EFFIGY OF MAN
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Jatin Gulati is an artist with an image-focused practice working across photography, drawing and text. Having a background in architecture as well as photography, he is interested in exploring how dominant narratives are sustained through images, systems, and structures of authority. Experimenting with the limits of the photographic image, his work is informed by the domestic setting, particularly looking at the image of the patriarch and his post-partition family archive, while extending into exploring colonial histories and postcolonial conditions in independent India.
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.
His work received the Lucie Foundation Emerging Fine Art Award 2025, and the Experimenter Generator Grant 2025. His recent exhibition includes Everything Leaks curated by Neighbor Collective at Dutch Warehouse, Kochi, 2025-26. He was shortlisted for the PhMuseum Photography Grant 2025, and his work was screened at Fotofestiwal 2025, Kranj Foto Fest 2025, and Verzasca Foto Festival 2025. His writings on photography have been published at ASAP Art 2023, PhotoSouthAsia, 2022 and Himal South Asian 2023. He has recently concluded an eight-month long PhMuseum’s IDEA Masterclass run by Adam Broomberg with a scholarship.
He teaches in the Contemporary Arts Practice Program at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, and is currently based in Bengaluru, India.
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Winner | OD Photo Prize 2026
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