A rare archival exhibition titled ‘Sparseeing’ is on display at Mumbai’s Cymroza Art Gallery, transforming the space into a vivid exploration of family memory and micro-histories. Presented in collaboration with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, and supported by the Tata Trusts and Seminar Lab Gallery, the project brings to light a forgotten 1935 photo archive discovered deep in the alcoves of a Jamshedpur home.

For Cymroza Art Gallery founder Dr. Pheroza Godrej, hosting this showcase represents a vital cultural moment for the region. “We don’t see too many of these shows in our part of India,” she stated during the opening event. Reflecting on her initial reaction to the exhibition’s title, she added, “When I first heard this name, I said, what is it? Are you now going to do a grammatical parsing of the Parsi community! And then this landed on my desk,” she says, holding the uniquely bound book.

The core of Sparseeing stems from an old family home in Jamshedpur – a house Dr. Godrej describes as having seen many, many avatars.” The original collection featured a large, interconnected Parsi family of brothers, wives, children and mothers-in-law. The historical slides, which were in bad shape, were brought to book designer and photographer Abhishek Basu in late 2020 by Varun, Keki Gazder’s grandson, who was starting a Parsi cafe and wanted to display them for the local community.

Basu later partnered with graphic artist Joyona Medhi to present this exhibition of meticulously cleaned and restored images. During the process, the characters and stories emerging from Keki Gazder’s lens compelled them to literally bind these archival treasures into a striking photobook, complete with an intricate family tree to map out the generations. The resulting exhibition, a tribute to Jamshedpur’s Gazder-Bharucha families, drew high praise from Dr. Godrej, who applauded the thoughtful presentation and transformation of the gallery. “It’s amazing what both of you have produced,” she remarked, adding how this transformation, “was precisely the purpose!”

The exhibition mainly celebrates the historical narrative of this photobook, which is available on sale at the gallery. Instead of viewing history as rigid facts, the curators invite the public to adopt ‘sparsity’ as an active perspective. “Sparsity is a verb,” explained graphic artist Joyona Medhi. “And we invite you all to sparsity today, which is to step into sparse bits of evidence, and to see from the point of view of fragments,” and through these fragmented memories, Parsi engineer Keki Gazder emerges as the central protagonist of the narrative.

Alkazi Foundation’s Rahaab Allana emphasized how the project challenged the very role of archival photography, pondering if it were simply evidence or a means of finding connect with each other. Praising the creators for this “speculative and fictive” work, he addressed an existential question facing modern archives: “What survives in history? The idea of speculation is to wonder what could have survived in history. And so, the idea of the invisible or the erasure, and that being made visible, is the importance of what we try to do.”

Having already travelled to New Delhi, Sparseeing will next grace Jamshedpur, honouring the city where Keki Gazdar originally captured these moments in 1935. This unique archival photo exhibition is on display at the Cymroza Art Gallery in Mumbai till 20^th June – a definite dekho for art enthusiasts and Parsis!