A photography collective, formed by nine women during the pandemic, brings forth an exhibition of works that explore each artist’s intimate and immediate world.
By Adira Thekkuveettil
An artist collective is somewhat rare in the art world. For an industry that relies on the name, talent and prestige of individual artists, curators, gallerists and even collectors, a group of artists operating under one umbrella offers a slight provocation, both to their audience and to the artists themselves. What can a collective voice do that individual artists cannot? And what frameworks of support can a collective offer to those operating within it?
When we logged into our first Zoom calls in late 2020, amidst the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, such questions did not weigh on our minds. Rather, when Kolkata-based artist Riti Sengupta first reached out to us to create an online meeting space for young female photographers, most of us said yes simply to fulfil our desire to remain tethered to an artistic community amidst a dark and isolating time. Very soon, we were meeting every Thursday at 8:30 pm (hence our name) to share our work, and talk, not only about photography, but also, inevitably, of the world and the lives we were finding ourselves leading.
Artist collectives usually come together with a shared interest and goals. There is often a manifesto, a charter, a set of agreed-upon motives. 8:30 did not start out that way and years after our inception, we are yet to come to a settled idea of who we are as a collective, what it means for us to exist and what we hope to achieve. This is not to say that a collective without a manifesto is unserious. On reflection, I can say with some confidence that one of the reasons we have managed to survive for half a decade is that we have never had a proclamation set in stone of who we must be and what we must do. It has allowed us to be honest with each other and sincere in the work we do when we are together, which in and of itself is our biggest challenge. When you have a group where no two artists live within 500 kilometres of each other, and where every member needs to earn a living outside of art-making, simply being in the same room is a miracle.
In early 2021, we were introduced to the artist Dayanita Singh and we spoke to her about the collective vision we were beginning to tease out of our individual practices. In a gesture of deep generosity, Dayanita extended her support and offered some of the most meaningful gifts that a group such as ours could have received—the gifts of access, space and her enduring belief in our potential. She also gave us a glimpse into her own process and practice with surprising trust and candour, and beginning in the summer of 2023, invited us to spend a week with her every year in her studio and home in Goa for an intensive residency.
Each year, we were instructed to bring thousands of small, printed photographs—the fruits of a year of photography times nine—and spread them out across her large and weathered editing tables. Each morning, she would flit from spread to spread and gradually, small piles of images would emerge—windows, hands, mothers, empty rooms, sisters, shoes, lovers, time, televisions, sadness, birthdays, beds. It did not really matter why we had made a photograph, or what we had originally intended as its purpose—documentation of an old art form, a collection of urban oddities, a record of late afternoon light on an old chair, a photograph of a brother playing with the dog, made with a phone and meant for the family group chat. Every little print had the potential to join another on the editing table, weaving stories that would have been impossible to conceptualise beforehand: Once upon a time, there were two lovers who lived in an empty house with a television that played a single movie on a loop. Outside, fireworks filled the sky, announcing a landslide election victory…
Dayanita taught us to listen to each image for its note, and as scores of little piles came together each day to be undone the next, we listened with her for the notes that remained. From Dayanita we have been slowly learning the art of composing with the raw material that constitutes our small, but growing archives.
Our particular interests, obsessions and curiosities have been steadily revealed to us as we have confronted the magnitude of the images we have made, year after year. And the more sincerely we have looked at and listened to our work as a group, one preoccupation more than any other has stared back at us: the Home.
The exhibition, Interior Weather, emerged from the editing tables in Goa during our most recent residency with Dayanita in 2025. Each of the nine artists have photographed their homes and families for years, some for decades. Kirthana Devdas, who had long been documenting the ancient ritual of Thira, a form of dance-drama in her hometown in Kerala, began to look at the ancestral family home that formed its backdrop, the anchor for a family that has scattered across the world. What does it mean to return home? The ancestral home forms the backdrop in Divya Cowasji’s photographs too, but this home is a bright and beautiful sanctuary, made magical by the high jinks of a much-adored family dog. It is not always the people that hold a family together.
On the other hand, this writer found her own family home bracing itself for a long journey towards death. Its occupants, her grandparents, were locking themselves in, while keeping the prying eyes of the world out of their final winters together. Does death have a place in the family album?
In Zahra Amiruddin’s photographs, we see a flourishing of life. The single most important room in the home hosts wedding parties and welcomes babies and makes room for elaborate feasts. But when everyone has left, it transforms into a nest for a tired family’s slumber. In Pavithra Ramanujam’s work, we see how the presence of young children in her home has enhanced her perception of everyday occurrences, leading her to new ways of approaching the family snapshot, the still life, the portrait. The family is perhaps photography’s most ubiquitous, yet elusive project.
The traditional kitchen was always at the heart of the stories that Menty Jamir grew up listening to. In photographing them now, she reflects on what inheritance really means. Can photographs, accompanied by stories and the pots and pans that sustained a family, be an endowment when, as an AoNaga woman, land and houses bypass you?
If photography can hold time still, can it also offer an infinite timescape for rest? Vinita Barretto offers such an image, a space for a mother to lay her head and take a moment, just one, for herself, outside of the demands of everyone else. In Mithila Jariwala’s photographs we are led further into a realm of sleep, wherein a couple seems to drift in and out of each other across the decades they have been together. And finally, Riti Sengupta offers us portraits of homes without their families, and incredibly, every detail in these photographs seems to reach out to us, to say: Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time I had a family, and they laughed and ate, played with their pets and did their homework, got married and had children, fell sick and died, and I held them through their lives, and now I hold what’s left.
This article was originally published in the March 2026 issue of ON Stage.
