Don’t miss: FOCUS Photography Festival

The FOCUS Photography Festival is a biennial celebration of the art form, featuring works from around the globe. The exhibitions – all relating to the theme ‘Cross Over’ – will fan out across Mumbai. We round up the most compelling sights at the second edition of the festival:

What: #Ungender
Where
: High Street Phoenix, Lower Parel
Should your sense of style be dictated by gender? Photographer Bikramjit Bose and ELLE collaborate to capture raw, intimate portraits of real people re-imagining fashion without the constraints of gender labels. 

What: ‘Call for Entries’ exhibition
Where
: Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Byculla
Selected works from a worldwide call for entries to interpret the festival theme, ‘Cross Over’, curated by executive director of the Goa Centre for Alternative Photography, Pa Madhavan. 

What: Fairer People = Beautiful People = Powerful People
Where
: Art Entrance Gallery, Fort
Photographer Arpan Mukherjee uses a group of dark-skinned subjects to examine our inherent bias towards those of fair skin.  

What: Neither Natural Nor Necessary
Where
: Muse, Kala Ghoda
Selected works from Canadian fine-art photographer Laura Letinsky’s acclaimed series III Form And Void Full, which uses eerily still images of chaos (crumbling cakes, squished fruits) to depict “the illusion of perfection”. 

What: SETS
Where
: The Hive, Bandra
Performances and installations, including one made with crowdsourced photos of the festival, addressing the rise in digital photography (thanks to smart devices), which is also indicative of our preferences, in the imagery we choose to capture.

What: BlowUp Bombay
Where
: Across Bandra
A public art project by Bengaluru-based photography website Blindboys.org which brings the works of amateur and professional artists to the streets of Bandra (and gives us more Insta-fodder).   

What: The Photographer And The Artist
Where
: Muse, Kala Ghoda
Vintage painted photographs from Rajasthan, which use the traditional Indian practice of ‘touching up’ portrait pictures with paint. 

What: On Love And Other Landscapes
Where
: Mumbai Art Room, Colaba
Palestinian artist yazan khalili (sic) creates a photo-novel made of 91 landscape images, creating a visual narrative of his abandonment by a lover.

What: I Once Was Alive
Where:
Gallery 7, Kala Ghoda
Shahid Datawala captures arresting photographs of derelict, even abandoned vintage cars. The pictures, he finds, are as much a portrait of their erstwhile owners. 

The FOCUS Photography Festival is on from March 12 to 26 in Mumbai. Check out their Facebook page for updates Facebook.com/FocusFocusfestivalmumbai.com 

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