THE VANISHING TATTOO ART OF THE WOMEN OF THE GOND TRIBES

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  • Cut down for Charcoal...
  • Cursed
  • Children of the Sea
  • A new spring has arrived
  • Praying to the Goddess of the Sea
  • A Breathless World
  • Mount Valley
  • Mulberry Harbour
  • Tales from the Dark Continent
  • GODNA
  • A meditation on finding
  • Into the great white open
  • above the treetops
  • Looking for Mona
  • Six feet under
  • Tegenwind
  • starstable
  • pages left unspoken
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Set against the landscape of Chattisgarh, Central India, Godna is a portrait of the elderly women of the Gond tribes known for their art of tattooing or Godna, as it’s called in Hindi. An ancient art form of tattooing the body in patterns that have remained unchanged for centuries. The word Godna itself is derived from ‘gehna’ or jewellery. The tattoos usually appeared around body parts where jewellery was worn in the belief that this jewellery will be adorned till the end of life and far beyond. It was, after all, all what was left after you died.

Unlike the photographs of a conventional social document the pictures emerge through a different visual language that is born out of a life of austerity combined with the daily struggle to adapt to a fast changing India. Amid these tremendous pressures that go hand in hand with modernisation comes an unavoidable aesthetic and photographic language of beauty and resilience. A language that emerges through the directness of the portraiture and surfaces in the details of its subjects. In muted colours reflecting the austere life these women led and are leading in some of the most unlikely and extraordinary surroundings. Unearthing a sense of being and dignity.