Sakshi Gallery is delighted to present Garden of weeds, a selection of photographs from the collection of V. Sanjay Kumar on display from Nov 11-Dec 6, 2025. The display brings together works by nine artists who have expanded the language of photography, experimenting with its formal, psychological, and political dimensions.

The earliest photograph in the exhibition is one of Gandhi along with his advisers, dating to 1946, taken at a time of political upheaval by Margaret Bourke-White, the American photojournalist known for her wartime photography. From here, the exhibition unfolds across time and geography, moving between the documentary and the staged, the personal and the performative.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard's evocative and enigmatic images reveal an experimentation with the photographic medium through blur and multiple exposures. Some of his portraits focusing on the individual, hold a dream-like quality, while others are staged and set in abandoned spaces. The photographs on view include works from Meatyard's final series, The family album of Lucybelle Crater, which presents portraits of friends as well family members, who adorn masks and enact symbolic dramas.

Personal histories are also explored in photographs taken by Vivan Sundaram. Drawing from photographs taken by his grandfather, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Sundaram's photomontages bring together three generations of family members, weaving together fact, fiction and memory.

Robert Longo's The Freud cycle reinterprets photographs of Sigmund Freud's Vienna apartment, taken under extraordinary circumstances. When Freud had to emigrate in 1938, his apartment was sealed. A photographer, however, managed to secure access to this space, turning his camera to Freud's iconic objects. Years later, Longo came across these photographs. In his reinterpretation, the artist translated the scenes into monumental hyperreal charcoal drawings, later rendered as pigment prints.

Also on view are works by acclaimed artist Shirin Neshat, with select photographs from her Women of Allah series (1993-1997) that explores identity, faith, resistance and women's experiences in the Middle East.

In writing on this collection, Kumar notes:

"This was meant to be a collection of singular visions that spoke not to each other but directly to me...These artists that I have managed to collect have that very same quality; their practice is unique in a field where the form is becoming generic. I daresay a single photograph of any of these artists conveys the entirety of their artistic impulse."