Scapes.

Dhoomimal Art Centre presents Before You See the Scar, an exhibition by visual artist Monica Dhaka, created in collaboration with acid attack survivors from the Brave Soul Foundation, Delhi. Opening on September 14 at Dhoomimal Art Centre, Connaught Place and on still September 23, the exhibition looks beyond the scars to the women’s identities, voices, dreams and lives.



For Monika Dhaka, the project is also an examination of the gaze itself: what we notice first, what we assume from an image, and what remains unseen when a scar becomes the first thing we see.

Excerpts from an interview

Your title asks us to see the person before the scar. Can photography ever be neutral when the camera itself determines what we see first?

I do not think the camera is ever completely neutral. It records what is in front of it, but the artist still decides what to show, what to hold back and where the viewer’s attention goes. That became important while working with acid attack survivors, because the scar is often the first and only thing people see. I wanted to interrupt that. The project begins with the scar, but without explanation, and later introduces the women through their portraits and words. For me, photography became a way of asking whether we can look beyond appearance and see the person first.

You transform scars and fragments of skin into landscapes and abstract forms. At what point does abstraction become a way of reclaiming an image from its traumatic history?

Before making the work, I spent two to three months looking at how acid attacks had already been represented. I also asked friends, family and people I met on the Mumbai local what came to mind when they heard “acid attack.” The answers were almost always scar, pain, pity and trauma. I realised we carry an image of a survivor before meeting her. So I photographed scars extremely closely, allowing them to become landscapes, folds or textures first. Later, the women appear through portraits and their own words. For me, abstraction allows the scar to hold more than one meaning.



 What did the women you photographed teach you about the difference between being looked at and being truly seen?

I think these women taught me that being looked at and being seen are very different things. We can look at someone and immediately notice their face, body, clothes or scars, but still know nothing about them. Being seen takes time. It means listening, staying curious and understanding what someone wants, fears, enjoys or struggles with. Many of these women are looked at constantly, but that does not mean they are understood. That stayed with me. I think all of us want to be seen beyond the most obvious thing about us, and this project made me understand that deeply.

You speak about marks left by violence, labour, discipline and simply living outside social expectations. Are scars, in your work, records of what happened to a body or evidence of how society treats it?

For me, the scar is both a record of what happened to the body and evidence of how society responds to that body afterwards. Without context, a close-up scar can look like a landscape or an abstract surface. The moment you know it belongs to an acid attack survivor, your response changes. The image has not changed, but your gaze has. That shift interests me. Growing up in India, I often saw stories about the attack itself, but less about what followed. Work, travel, public spaces, staring, judgement. So the scar also records how society continues to treat the survivor.

Beauty is often the first thing a viewer encounters in your images, before the reality underneath reveals itself. Do you see that tension as a form of seduction, confrontation or resistance?

For me, it is a mixture of seduction, confrontation and resistance, but confrontation matters most. I want the viewer to first encounter the image without knowing what it is, perhaps noticing texture, lines or even beauty. Then they learn it is an acid attack scar, and something changes. I am interested in that moment. Why does the image feel different when its history becomes known? The photograph itself has not changed. I am not using beauty to hide violence. I am using it to make the viewer stay with the image longer, and question the assumptions they bring to it.


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