As a child I spent considerable time in the city of Shimla in Northern India where my father was a research scholar at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. A visit to the Indian Coffee House some three kilometres walk away was often a part of our late afternoon routine. Now more than 40 years later it endures, largely unchanged. Its atmosphere, patrons, and political conversations remain, preserved as a workers’ cooperative born from colonial exclusion. It continues to function as an informal public space where democratic debate and the creation of cultural capital are sustained outside of an institutional setting. My work traces its continuity as a quiet civic monument and acknowledges both the personal and national history that it embodies. – Yask Desai
CCP.PE.ZINE is a new collaborative publishing initiative from the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) and Perimeter Editions, dedicated to providing a platform for emerging photographic artists to exhibit their work in an accessible zine format. Each zine in the series – launched periodically in pairs – focuses on a single body of work by artists selected by the CCP.
Yask Desai is a Melbourne-based Australian-Indian visual artist who works with photography, video, archives and text.
32 pages, 14.8 x 21 cm, saddle-stitched zine, Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) x Perimeter Editions (Naarm / Melbourne).