Families are fretful, complicated things. Especially now, in an age when domestic structures have rapidly changed and even the definition of “family” has grown, expanded and morphed into something more layered and nuanced than mere blood relations. The group photography and video exhibition at Vadehra Gallery, curated by Sunil Gupta and Vidya Shivadas, takes the word and throws it up into the air, freeing it from dated notions and the shackles of tradition.

The show comprises work by a range of artists including Anusha Yadav, Clare Arni, Gauri Gill, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi , Sarindar Dhaliwal, Priya Sen, Nandini Valli Muthiah and Sunil Gupta. It is ambitious in scale, yet interesting and varied enough to keep a viewer intrigued.

To begin with, there are British photographer Clare Arni’s portraits of Belgian ascetic Meera as she emerges from her thirty-year spiritual retreat spent in a cave in Hampi. More than artfully striking, the images are documentary in style – Meera cooking in the cave or her sitting within her living quarters, her getting a haircut (probably to mark the end of her retreat). There is joy, wonder and apprehension on the woman’s face as she embraces a world she has cut herself from for so many years. She cuddles a dog, takes a boat ride, strokes the bark of a tree, drapes herself over a rock, or stares pensively into a horizon marked by the Vijaynagar ruins. The series is as much about reacquainting oneself with their “home” as much as seeing it with new eyes.

While these images seem spontaneous and “street”, Nandini Valli Muthiah’s “Remembering to Forget” series is steeped in performance where children enact, in a fancy dress competition in a school in Chennai, roles that their parents have chosen for them. The characters range from Shiva and Hanuman to figures from Indian history such as Indira Gandhi, Rani of Jhansi, and Bhimrao Ambedkar  as well as nameless “policeman”, “doctor” and “lawyer”. Far from cute and amusing, the photographs are a poignant reminder of how children are often weighed down by their parents’ expectations, how they may “perform” these roles throughout their lives simply to obey them and keep them happy.

On a more poignant note, however, are Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s photographic records of his father’s battle with cancer. Shot in gritty monochrome, the images from “The House Next Door” series capture the artist’s father in the most regular of poses – lounging on a divan, napping on a sofa, looking out of a window, getting a shave – yet what hangs heavy is the constant underlying threat of extinction, of not “being” there. “What Remains”, a photo of an empty chair, is truly an image that says more than a thousand words.

Sunil Gupta’s ongoing series “Country” also forms part of the display, and as the exhibition note explains, it “investigates the traces of his father's family in rural Uttar Pradesh and its three-hundred-year trajectory into the modern world.” Apart from the formal portrait, the idea of family is replete in the images – one shows a man holding up a hand-drawn family tree, another is a close-up of a torn, sepia-tinted photo, while others capture empty domestic spaces. This is an attempt to document as much as possible without missing anything or leaving anything out. There is within the series an urgency to remember, as though without photographic evidence, everything would cease to exist.

Also exploring the theme of memory is Anusha Yadav fantastic online project “The India Memory Project”, which called for people in the country to submit pre-Independent photographs of friends and family. They were also requested to relate a story in connection to the image – hereby taking the private family archive into an open public space.

At the end, the exhibition seems to have merely scratched the surface of “family” and “home”; you leave it only wanting to see more.