gauri gill captures shelters amid tractors by india's farmers

gauri gill exhibits the village on the highway

Gauri Gill’s The Village on the Highway is an architectural exploration of social resilience, capturing the improvised spatial strategies of Indian farmers’ protests. On view at Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, the exhibition presents 90 photographs that offer an architectural reading of the movement’s material culture. The large-format analog works showcase the transformation of roadsides into self-sustaining settlements, where farming vehicles became shelter, tarpaulin sheets became walls, bamboo structures formed partitions, and doors were cut through fabric enclosures, creating adaptable spaces for rest, cooking, bathing, and communal gathering.

The road itself was also reimagined as fertile ground — small patches of earth where vegetables were planted to provide sustenance. Objects of daily life, including cooking pots, khus coolers, and mosquito nets, also take on a sculptural quality in her compositions, highlighting both necessity and resourcefulness. Photographing these adaptive structures, Gill reconstructs their material presence within the gallery, reinforcing the ingenuity of the living environments, the urgency of the series, and the plight of the marginalized farmers. The show opened on February 4th, and will remain on view until March 4th, 2025.

all images © Gauri Gill | courtesy of the artist and Vadehra Art Gallery

an architectural exploration of social resilience

Gauri Gill, known for her immersive and collaborative photographic practice, has long explored rural and marginalized communities, using her medium to capture the resilience, ingenuity, and self-sufficiency embedded in their lived environments. In The Village on the Highway, which was created over a year in 2021, the Indian photographer turns her lens on the ephemeral yet highly adaptive structures built by protesting farmers who camped for over a year along highways leading into New Delhi.

The series encapsulates what Gill describes as ‘an unusual, handmade, and homegrown architecture of resistance.’ Farmers, contesting deregulation policies threatening their livelihoods, transformed their agricultural vehicles — tractors, trolleys, and tempos — into makeshift homes, weathering extreme conditions from searing heat to monsoon rains. In her large-format analog photographs, Gill documents how this temporary infrastructure functioned as an improvised but highly effective living environment. The Village on the Highway by Gauri Gill is presented by Vadehra Art Gallery at D-40 Defence Colony, New Delhi, running from February 4th to March 4th, 2025.

Gauri Gill presents The Village on the Highway