“You’re Indian, Aren’t You?” brings 55 works by seven photographers

By Daniel Okafor

Fifty-five works by seven photographers form You’re Indian, Aren’t You?, a group photography exhibition opening at XYZ Photo Gallery in Melbourne’s Docklands on November 7 and running through December 20.

Curator Hiya Thacker has assembled the show around Indian identity and its perception in Australia, with each photographer drawing on personal experience. An opening night will run from 6pm to 8pm on November 7.

Thacker’s starting point came while working in hospitality, when a customer asked whether she was Indian and the question stayed with her. “The more I thought about it, the more I was kind of thinking about what it means to be Indian,” she said.

Her premise is that Indian identity carries internal differences that a generic question can erase. The question works like a name badge with a single line, Indian, and leaves out everything else.

What does the question reveal?

Thacker spent most of her life in India before moving to Australia three years ago to study. Living abroad, she says, strengthened her connection to her cultural background rather than loosening it.

In India, she rarely questioned her cultural identity. The variety of people around her in Australia prompted a closer look at her upbringing, the values she grew up with, and the land that shaped them.

She also credits contact with other cultures in Australia for shaping how she relates to her own heritage. Her account starts from lived experience rather than an abstract debate about nationality.

People from Indian backgrounds, she believes, can meet assumptions in Australia that overlook the country’s many regions, traditions and lived experiences. “Just asking the question, ‘You’re Indian, aren’t you?’ flattens the whole identity of all different identities of so many people in the country,” she said. The title therefore frames the problem: a label becomes a prompt that the person must answer for it.

What can 55 works actually show?

The exhibition’s stated method is plural. Each of the seven photographers offers an individual interpretation of India, drawing on personal experience rather than supplying a single definition of the country. Thacker wants the pictures to let visitors recognise diversity within India and across its diaspora, including the shaping role of place.

Her ambition is not a checklist of Indian culture, but a set of self-defined positions. Her argument places geography at the centre: where a person lives shapes who they become.

That ambition carries a material risk. The announcement names no photographers, individual work titles or specific pictures, and it gives no details about subjects, formats or photographic processes. We cannot yet tell whether the exhibition’s variety of voices will be visible in the images, or whether the pictures will carry the argument on their own.

Until the exhibition opens, its central promise remains curatorial intention, not demonstrated achievement. The selection will have to make difference visible, rather than relying on the title to announce it.

Within the group-exhibition tradition and the broader practice of diaspora self-representation, the structure offers a way to resist a single official account. One curator sets the question; seven image-makers respond from different positions. The stated aim is not to authenticate one representative image of India, but to place different personal readings of a place side by side. The title keeps a piece of everyday speech in view, refusing to replace it with a more polished and equally reductive answer.

The show’s significance also lies in who frames the discussion. Thacker, who moved from India to Australia three years ago to study, has placed the experience of migration at the centre of the institutional framing. That perspective does not guarantee a wider range of voices within the selected group, and the missing artist list makes that limit hard to judge. It does, however, make the exhibition worth watching as an argument about curatorial authority, not only a display of cultural belonging.

Where does the exhibition go next?

The opening on November 7 will give the public its first test: do these 55 works make differences of region, tradition and belonging visible, rather than leaving a single image of Indianness to stand for everyone? The question matters because Thacker’s account began with a personal identity becoming shorthand for others. Her exhibition proposes photography as a way to interrupt that reduction.

For now, specificity remains thin. Curatorial ambition is clear; evidence about the pictures is not. Over the run through December 20, the exhibition will test whether a customer’s question can open a sustained public examination of Indian identity in Australia without answering it too neatly.