Akin to the Winter Sun
Rishi Kochhar
Growing up as the son of an army officer in India, Rishi and his family moved around a lot. The origins of this peripatetic lifestyle can be traced back to the Partition, an event which uprooted his grandparents from Western Punjab and forced them to settle in the freshly carved Indian Union. The result was an identity that has been in constant flux.
This project explores the formation of identity and the way in which it is inextricably entwined with geography. The question of ‘where he was from’ had always plagued Rishi, and steadily grew into an internal conflict. A part of him consciously rejected the idea of home and revolted against it, while the other part longed to belong. This idea of belonging and the concept of a hometown, which develops naturally in most people, never really took root in his mind. This lack slowly grew in him and became a void, an empty space accentuated by the diversity of our land where religious, regional and ethnic identities continually occupy the foreground. When he entered his twenties, he felt a strong urge to reclaim that void, to rediscover lost ties and to reimagine the space called home.
The focus of this project, titled Akin to the Winter Sun, was to create a visual record of the self, insofar as any notion of selfhood is mediated by the geographies, spaces and objects that accompany it.
Biography
Rishi Kochhar is a photographer and writer, currently residing in Chandigarh, India. An architect by training, he holds a Master of Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. His practice is concerned with issues of identity and memory, and how these two interact—and are inextricably linked—with geography. In his work, he focuses on long-term personal projects, looking both within and without, while also pursuing more traditional social-documentary themes. Rishi’s work was recently showcased as part of Angkor Photo Festival’s ‘Alumni Curates’ project. He also received the jury commendation at the Toto-Tasveer Awards in 2019.
His writing has been published in The Caravan, Critical Collective and PIX Quarterly. Rishi also exhibited at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi in 2014, as part of the student show, Prarambh.