Jun 15 2025 to Jun 15 2025 5:30 p.m.

Where

Champaca Bookstore, Library and Cafe

7/1 Edward Road, Off Queens Road 560052

Event Description

Join us on Sunday, 15th June, for a presentation of How to Climb a Tree, Aparna Nori’s beautiful and deeply personal photobook. Aparna will be in conversation with Gayatri Ganju and Kaamna Patel. Come to marvel over the stunning photographs and intricate illustrations; stay for a meditation on art, time, belonging, and growing up. 

Here are the event details: 

Date: 15 June 2025, Sunday

Time: 5:30PM

Venue: Champaca Bookstore, Vasanth Nagar

About the book: 

HOW TO CLIMB A TREE, Aparna's deeply lyrical photobook, is a personal, intuitive image series that episodically documents a timespan when her 10-year-old son was living in a boarding school in Madanapalle, India. What emerges is a collaborative project between mother and son drawn over five years of communication, wherein the images become meditative, introspective traces of places and moments that felt like home for both of them. Interspersed with handwritten letters and illustrations, the book examines how a physical absence or distance can be expressively redrafted through emotional awareness. In this photobook, Aparna creates a safe space - one in which she allows her own vulnerability of the experience of motherhood to slip through while also trying to root her son, giving him a way to return to this time and space again and again. 

About the speakers: 

Author: 

Aparna Nori is a photographer and visual artist based between Singapore and Bangalore, India. Aparna draws upon personal memory to have a dialogue with the quotidian. Her response is articulated through a range of mediums including alternative photographic processes, installations, video, digital photography and the book form. Aparna is a member of Women Photograph.

Moderators: 

Gayatri Ganju (b. 1989) is an artist and documentary photographer from Bangalore. Her personal practice is rooted in a deep and tangled relationship with landscape, while editorially she covers stories about women, the environment and public healthcare.

Kaamna Patel is a photographer born in Mumbai, India. She founded Editions JOJO in 2019 an independent publishing house, photobook library & an artist-led platform based in Mumbai where she embodies numerous roles. She has been an artist in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 2022, and at SqW:Lab, Mumbai, in 2024. Her books have entered institutional archives such as the Getty Museum in L.A, the Tate Modern in London, Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, amongst others.