New Delhi: ‘Dark Perceptions’ by Raihan Rajiv Vadra, the 20-year-old son of Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and businessman Robert Vadra, isn’t your ordinary photo exhibit. When you’re walking through the exhibit at Delhi’s Bikaner House, you can’t see anything but the photographs on display. Quite literally.
The exhibition is pitch dark and each visitor’s experience has been controlled — it’s like going on a ride in an adventure park.
Upon entering, you find yourself in a blinding, pitch dark room that is disorienting. Adrenaline rushes through the body and puts it on high alert. A small red laser light blinks in a distance, one slowly follows it, minding each step. Instrumental music led by a piano plays in the background, adding to the eerie atmosphere.
But just when you’re ready to turn around and flee the room, percussion kicks in and the music gets upbeat. It’s both creepy and groovy at the same time. Four pictures light up around you, and the sharp green eyes of a tiger pierce through you.
At this point, one feels completely out of control and almost surrenders to the choreography set up by Raihan and his team. This experience was, of course, written most deliberately.
“I see a lot of control, in people surrounding me, in the world around me. Everyone is controlled by certain things… certain judgements. I just wanted to mirror that in my work,” Raihan told ThePrint.
“So, as soon as you enter, you see I take control. What you do, where you go, what you see… I’ve even tried to, as much as I could, control the emotions that you feel in there.”
According to Raihan, “we’re all prisoners of our own perceptions”, and it’s the darkness that sets us free.
“When we don’t know what lies ahead, when it’s completely dark, I can’t control you. I don’t know who you are, what you feel, how you feel it. That’s where you’re free…” he said. “And I feel art flows in that freedom. So, you’ll see, even though everything is so controlled, none of the pictures have captions. I don’t want my perspective to be imposed on anybody.”
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Why ‘dark perception’
Raihan Vadra is currently a student at SOAS, London, and is co-founder of “i parliament”, an initiative that seeks to bring together students from schools across India to “discuss, debate, design and enact ‘law’ in a simulated parliamentary session.
Raihan said he first picked up photography when he was with his mother Priyanka at Ranthambore in 2011, while she was conducting research for her book The Tiger’s Realm. Just 11 years old at the time, Vadra clicked pictures of nature around him. The exhibition is a collection of pictures he’s clicked over all these years.
When he was 17, Raihan said, he lost complete sight in his right eye while playing cricket in school, after he was hit by a leather ball. “Life imitates art, and art imitates life. After I lost vision in this eye, I had even relinquished photography for a while, only to pick it up again. That’s why there’s a lot of darkness in my work.”
While Raihan completely takes you in with that grand opening, by the last collection of photos, he also sets you free. The tone of the photographs is much lighter, and so is the theme. One photograph has a leaf drifting away in water, which is how you feel. He’s let go of his control, and now you can make what you want of this intoxicating experience you just had.
The exhibition will be up till Saturday, 17 July.
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