Bharat Sikka On Why He Considers Himself An Outlier In The Creative World

All art is autobiographical — consciously or subconsciously. And so, even though the stated subject of Bharat Sikka’s ongoing Souvenir Shop at Mumbai’s Nature Morte is the cute yet complex world of the Japanese pop culture, delve deeper and you’ll discover that at its heart, the exhibition and the accompanying photobook is all about Bharat Sikka — the man, the father, the husband, the photographer, the nomad and yes, the unabashed Japanophile. "My projects are deeply personal," Sikka admits, while speaking to Esquire India over Zoom during the opening week of Souvenir Shop which runs at Nature Morte until Sept. 6th. "The idea is often the first thing that attracts me but then, I am also looking at the world through my personal lens. Honestly, we all do," says the one of India's top photographers, whose mysterious and spellbinding visual style follows few rules and undoubtedly, breaks 'em all. 

Two years in the making, Souvenir Shop started as a collaboration between Sikka and an unlikely creative ally. "My daughter Mannat is a big fan of Japanese culture," he says, adding with a laugh, "In fact, my whole family is." Exploring cities like Tokyo and Kyoto and the countryside around Mount Fuji, the 52-year-old artist, his wife and their three children including the Haiku-loving Mannat Sikka, found themselves engrossed in touristy adventures like street food, shopping, taking pictures and collecting souvenirs. A book or an exhibition was the last thing on their mind. As Sikka puts it, "We were just another average Indian family on vacation.” Only after returning home and exchanging notes with his daughter did the first stirrings of the concept emerge. “I realised that she and I had very different but in some ways, parallel stories to share about the trip. It all happened organically,” says Sikka, whose imagination and craft is so strikingly avant-garde and uncompromising that you merely need to walk around the predominantly black-and-white multiverse that calls itself Souvenir Shop to know how he has imbued his unique gaze with an enigmatic aesthetic.

Fittingly, his latest body of work eschews all the conventional traces that afflicts modern photography. Absent here are human figures and even prosaic codes that pass for urban landscapes, instead the maverick photographer delights in the possibilities and paradoxes of fragmented abstraction and nonlinear trajectories. How does he turn familiar vignettes into something so ineffable? For Sikka, all visuals are perpetual pilgrims, with no fixed address or even a final destination. They are works in progress, subject to the whims of the artist who folds, rearranges or paints on them, conjures unusual collage-like trails that blur the line between representation and abstraction and other ritual gestures that grant him the power to transform digital prints into what one might call ‘photo sculptures.’ In Souvenir Shop — which riffs on everything from Studio Ghibli films to Kazuo Ishiguro and Haruki Murakami's literature — there exist several images that have been reshot, manipulated and remade in Sikka's Chhatarpur studio in New Delhi, as he sought to breathe new life into them. "Most of these photographs are multi-layered. They chronicle many stories and memories of objects, places and people. Once back in my studio, I began looking at them closely and decided that it would be great to assemble and reconfigure them anew, adding some more perspective and complexities along the way. For example, I reshot souvenirs we had collected, like a mountain stone, second-hand kimono or a Japanese doll," says Sikka, who cites Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, David Lynch and Edward Hopper among his influences. 

This whimsical approach is in keeping with the spirit of Sikka's creative sensibilities. He considers himself an outlier in the world of photography: “I don’t belong to any school, nor do I have a particular style.” But he’s absolutely committed “to chasing the idea in my head right till the end of the world," as he quips, while acknowledging that the formative years he spent at Parsons School of Design in New York between 1997-2002 were instrumental in shaping his vision. Shortly thereafter, he returned to India where his career took off in earnest. And it was here that he found both his creative muse and success, with slow-burning projects like The Sapper, Indian Men, the Kashmir-based Where the Flowers Still Grow and Matter breaking new ground and establishing him as one of the most distinctive voices in Indian photography. Much like Souvenir Shop which captures the father-daughter dynamic, The Sapper remains one of Sikka's best-loved and most intimate series which explored the unspoken bond between him and his father, Suresh who worked in the Indian Army. Sikka had an itinerant childhood but he was lucky to have an encouraging father who pushed him to follow his heart. He explains, "In The Sapper, I wanted to break the stereotype about Indian men and how we perceive masculinity. But it was also a way for me to enter my father's life and get to know him a little better. It was like a personal journey.” 

At one point in our conversation, Sikka defines his own photography as "performative" of sorts (as opposed to something "staged.”) In The Sapper, it "was my father who was performing.” One might argue that his complicity with his subjects is simply a way for him to tease out the essential truth at the core of an image. "I like my photographs to be playful, childlike and irreverent. My dream is to remain a student of photography for the rest of my life,” says Sikka, whose next project is titled Vicinity  — an ambitious series that he has been working on for almost a decade. It revisits the most tragic accident of his life when his studio had burned down and he was forced to take an involuntary break. Expect yet another Sikka act from the charred remains of the day, this time not as a souvenir but as a shrine to memories lost and found.