Home in the City, Bombay 1976 – Mumbai 2016

Sooni Taraporevala’s first UK solo exhibition has launched at The Whitworth in partnership with Sunaparanta, Goa Centre for the Arts.  The photographer, screenwriter and filmmaker’s exhibit forms a part of the 2017 programme of events for New North and South a new major contemporary art network across the North of England and South Asia.

The exhibition presents life in Bombay/Mumbai from 1976 to the present day through 30 black and white photographs and is guest-curated by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, for Sunaparanta, Goa Centre for the Arts with patronage from Dattaraj and Dipti Salgaocar.

Since 1976 Taraporevala has captured the city in which she grew up and now the works on display at the Whitworth are personal documents of the city’s eccentrics, its children, its elderly and the landscape, reflecting politics and culture, with Sooni Taraporevala commenting “I wanted to display a range of images from different situations and time periods, to reflect the diversity of my home city, over a span of forty years.”

Born in Bombay in 1957, Taraporevala, who was awarded a Padma Shri by the Government of India in recognition for her contribution to the arts, left India when she was 18 to attend Harvard University, before securing an MA in Cinema Studies at New York University and then returning home to work as a freelance photographer.  The film for which she wrote her first screenplay, Salaam Bombay!, was nominated for an Oscar and led to her writing other works including Mississippi Masala, Such a Long Journey, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, The Namesake and her directorial debut Little Zizou which was a national award.

Her photography is equally as feted – she authored and publisher 30 years’ of photographs on the Parsi community in 2000 in the book PARSIS A Photographic Journey.  Her photographs have also been displayed at Musee du Quai Branly (France), The Tate Modern, The MET New York, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi and Institut Valencia d’Art Modern (Spain).

Sooni Taraporevala: Home in the City, Bombay 1976 – Mumbai 2016 is exhibited at the Whitworth from 4 March until early 2018.