Walkthrough with Maya Kumari Suthar

The Desert Land examines the transformation of Rajasthan’s Thar Desert through the entanglement of personal memory and colonial archives. Drawing on ethnographic photography, cartography, and census records from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the work reflects on how desert communities were classified and governed, leading to cultural and spatial displacement. By placing familial histories alongside state-produced records, silences within the archive are revealed, while the colonial gaze is inverted through self-recording and the centring of the artist’s body, reclaiming subjecthood and agency.

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Host or Publisher Public Arts Trust of India