PERCY KAKI

Photobook: This is a Protest

In her photobook, This is a Protest (2021), the artist traces the afterlife of the 1991 Tsunduru Massacre in Andhra Pradesh. The Reddy landowners targeted the Dalit inhabitants with the alleged assistance of the village police. Kaki visualizes the absences, hauntings, dissonances, and erasure that have subsequently affected surviving kin. Intertwining her personal recollections recounted by her parents who witnessed the event, together with archival research, the book complicates and reanimates the incident—its genesis, and aftermath in a non-linear, sensory manner. The latter half of the book is marked, in contrast, by food and feasting, that registers as community activity. The spirit of celebration itself communicates as protest, foregrounding recipes (and tales of culinary discrimination) from the artist’s mother.

Percy Kaki is a visual artist based in Hyderabad, India. She works across media, investigating memory and gender in the context of marginalisation and violence. She is a part of Yakshi, the Constitutional Values in a Praxis Programme, working with marginalized women using art to understand the Indian Constitution. Her works have been shown in numerous exhibitions and venues, including Kaghazi Pairahan: Publishing & Resistance in South Asia at the 2023 Arles Photo Festival, Fault Lines –Visual Symptoms of Discordance in Indian History at Conflictorium, Ahmedabad.

The artist would like to acknowledge PhotoSouthAsia for their support.