Showroom

Diaporama Photos

For Show­room, Cham­pas­sak trav­eled repeat­edly to Villupu­ram and Koovaagam in South India, where grow­ing num­bers of hijras, eunuch, trans­ves­tites and trans­gen­ders gather each year as Ara­va­nis, wor­ship­pers of a local deity, for a fes­ti­val filled with cel­e­bra­tions of both reli­gious, mytho­log­i­cal and sex­ual nature. After exper­i­ment­ing with a num­ber of pho­to­graphic means to illu­mi­nate what he encoun­tered in the dingy hotels tem­porar­ily turned into broth­els, he decided on a dis­tinc­tive use of flash that opens a room for his sub­jects where they can show them­selves — and recede back into the dark­ness that brought them forth. Simul­ta­ne­ously, as viewer we are forced to inhabit the same cir­cle of light, which makes it more dif­fi­cult to dis­tance our­selves from the events. In fact, the entire Show­room series is built with a strong empha­sis on view­ing, look­ing, eye­ing, star­ing and star­ing back, not because Cham­pas­sak invites us to be cheap voyeurs at an exotic fes­ti­val with lots of seedy sex, but because for him, it’s for eyes to do the thinking.



Hester Keijser