TELIA

A SOLO SHOW BY: YASK DESAI

Yask Desai’s visually based project entitled Telia, attempts to reanimate and reexamine the experiences of the men who migrated from undivided India and worked as hawkers or travelling salesman within rural Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Telia was the word used to refer to Australia by some of the migrant’s families who were left behind in India.

The final work involves the production of a photobook consisting of archival artefacts (including documents and collected historical photographs) in combination with his own photography. In its gallery exhibit form the work also includes a series of video poems that help to place Desai, as an Anglo-Indian artist, within the overall narrative framework of the project.

"As an Anglo-Indian my own life experience within both the wider Australian and Indian societies and through the associated cultural bodies of each social group was invaluable in assisting me to attempt to understand the experience of cultural dislocation that the men who worked as hawkers may have faced."

About the Artist

Yask Desai is a Melbourne-based Australian-Indian visual artist who works with photography, video, archives and text. His work concerns itself with themes of place and collective and individual identity. Desai often combines historical and social research to explore the cultural connections between imagery, history and constructions of identity. He continues to work on multiple projects and his current work Telia, formed the basis of his Master’s Degree research. The work reimagines the lives of the men who migrated from India to Australia in the later half of the 19th century and worked as hawkers (travelling salesman) selling goods to the inhabitants of regional Australia. His work has been featured by Ballarat International Foto Biennale, and PIX India, and acknowledged as a finalist in the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain, Wyndham Art Prize, National Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, CLIP Award at the Perth Centre for Photography, HeadOn Photo Festival, Australia and New Zealand Photobook Award and was awarded ‘Most Critically Engaged Work’ at Salon at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne.

"Yask is currently a candidate for the Masters in Photography

at Photography Studies College in Melbourne."