Tamasha

88 pages, 220 × 260 mm, 75 colour plates
Cahier-bound debossed brochure
Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon at Loose Joints Studio
Designed & Published by Loose Joints

The inaugural winner of the Publishing Performance residency and book award uses sculpture, collage and reappropriation to capture the synaesthesia of a rural Indian working-class spectacle.

Tamasha follows 100-person Dalit ‘families’ of actors performing Tamasha: a travelling form of dance, song, and festivities that criss-crosses the state of Maharashtra. As post-independence India moved away from rural dance and song forms, Tamasha became stigmatised, polarised and relegated in Indian society. Khedekar’s images dive into the complexity of this sociocultural fabric with a dizzying array of artistic techniques, from staging, performance, collage, video and sound. Khedekar’s bricolage of visual forms elevates the make-do, unpretentious attitude of Tamasha performance into a unique aesthetic of song, community and expression: creativity far from the urban centre.

Khedekar is the recipient of Publishing Performance 2022: an artist’s residency and publishing award focused on the intersections of photography and performance. Khedekar developed his work as artist-in-residence at Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, for a book to be edited, designed and published by Loose Joints.