Nov 22 2026 to Nov 22 2026 11 a.m.

Book/Buy

Where

Museum of Art & Photography (MAP)

Kasturba Road, Bengaluru 560001

Event Description

This 2-hour workshop invites participants to gather and write about or alongside family photographs–a small selection of images or subarchive of your choice from family albums that you wish to spend time with.

Through readings, guided prompts, and collective writing time, we’ll explore different ways of entering a photograph–through memory and nostalgia, absence and grief, grammar and aesthetic, personal and collective histories, fiction and speculation, research and restoration, political and social contexts, or simply as a way of staying related to someone within the photograph.

The session begins with a short lecture and discussion, followed by a focused 45-minute writing period, and concludes with some reflective time together. Participants are free to write in any form–poetry, letters, essays, notes, as research, or to inspire making a new artwork. This workshop emphasizes process over product; nothing will be shared or critiqued. This workshop is an invitation to return, unceremoniously but persistently, to look again and pay attention to a few photographs that ritualize remembering and writing, amidst so many others that constantly demand our time. This workshop is open to anyone and everyone. 

As part of Art is Life: Elsewhere this workshop is hosted as an offshoot series of programs hosted at partner venues across Bengaluru as part of our annual festival Art is Life.

Cheryl Mukherji
Facilitator

Cheryl Mukherji (b. 1995) is a visual artist and writer based between New York and New Delhi. Her interdisciplinary artistic, writing, and research practice engages familial and vernacular archives as sites to question origin and inheritance: how do maternal, material, and colonial legacies of photography shape personal and collective memory?

Recently, Cheryl was shortlisted for the C/O Berlin Talent Award (2025), awarded the Howard Tanenbaum Fellowship at The Image Center, Toronto (2025) and the New Generation Prize (Honorable Mention) at the PH Museum Women Photographers Grant (2024), and was the finalist for the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture (2024).

Her work has been exhibited, both solo and in group shows at the National Gallery of Canada, Humboldt Forum (Berlin), Photo Elyseé Museum (Switzerland), Brooklyn Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian; Museum of the City of New York, Minnesota Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography, Museum of the Moving Image, Capture Photography Festival, Format Photo Festival, Penumbra Foundation, The Print Center, Baxter St. at Camera Club of New York, among others. Cheryl’s works are included in collections at the Harvard Art Museums, Arthshila India, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard College, New York (2020).