The Hole Project is a meditation on the orifices of the human body. Comprising a series of 39 photographs, each of which fixes upon a single bodily “hole”—the eye, the penis, the ear, the vagina, the nipple, the anus, the nostril, the mouth—Ontario-based artist Har-Prakash Khalsa’s work, exhibited at grunt gallery in the summer of 1999, reflects upon the fundamental role corporeal orifices play in shaping individual experience. 

“Gateways,” “doors,” “entry points”*: such are the terms Khalsa employs by way of describing the subjects represented in The Hole Project. Crossing their thresholds, into their depths, matter is registered as sights, sounds, smells, and tastes; “from vocalization to ejaculation to the expressing of mother’s milk,”* our orifices also comprise points of discharge. All of the photographs in The Hole Project are of equal size, measuring 27 inches wide and 29 inches high. By magnifying and isolating particular features of the body, often to the point of abstraction, Khalsa invites our gaze to explore regions that “we all have in common and use daily without much thought,”* but around which “revolve many of life’s important questions”*: “to see or not to see, to speak or not to speak, to have sex or not, to give birth or not, to experience cosmic states of consciousness or not…”* 

*From Khalsa’s Artist Statement