Initiated by photographer Prashant Panjiar and author Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Sensorium’s first year is a reflection on photography. By interweaving themes from books, music, poetry and the arts, the festival aims to show how everything creates a visual in our minds. To this aim, eminent Indian photographers Dayanita Singh and Farrokh Chothia will hold exhibitions; Sooni Taraporevala and Regina Maria Anzenberger will talk about movies and handmade books respectively; and photographer Fausto Giaccone and curator Jesús Clavero-Rodríguez will bring a slice of Latin America to our shores. The festival will be held in Sunaparanta, Goa Centre for the Arts, from 6th December, 2014, to 5th February, 2015.

 

Subrata Biswas, Adil Hasan and Sudeep Sen

 

Photo-Poetry: Octavio Paz in India

 

 

Octavio Paz, Ambassador of México in India from 1962-68, not only wrote many poems on his time here, but also met his wife Marie Jose here, and married her under a neem tree in the garden of the Mexican embassy. His poems have been visually interpreted by Subrata Biswas (the accompanying photo), Adil Hasan and Sudeep Sen by pitching “the photographic frame versus the stanza, the colours or the grey scale versus the adjectives and the light versus the rhythm”.

 

---

 

Anusha Yadav

 

A People’s History

 

 

Interweaving family photographs with personal anecdotes, Anusha Yadav’s much-celebrated Indian Memory Project reveals a country and a subcontinent that is far more diverse, curious and surprising than we think.

 

---

 

Farrokh Chothia

 

Jazz

 

 

One of India’s most celebrated fashion photographers, Farrokh Chothia retrieves his jazz portraiture, which are stark, feeling-soaked studies. As Salman Rushdie commented, “In these photographs, we see the range of Farrokh Chothia’s visual music. This is a fine portfolio that captures the spirit of a new jazz age, one centered not on glamour but on work. Don’t look at these pictures in silence. They ask for music to be played.”

 

---

 

Fausto Giaccone

 

Macondo — The World of Gabriel García Márquez

 

 

Fausto Giaccone’s exhibition captures the Goa that could pass off as the fictional Macondo with “old women on the stoop of ancient churches, siesta calm in hot air, a mood of love and revenge and despair”.

 

---

 

Sohrab Hura

 

Life is Elsewhere

 

 

When Sohrab Hura was nominated to Magnum, only the second Indian to be invited to join, 37 years after Raghu Rai, MW had noted that he’s extremely sensitive to people and the world around him. His mother’s paranoid schizophrenia had first steered Hura towards a career in photography, which is also the subject of this exhibition.