Curator’s essay

Aparna Nori’s images arrive within the dual complexes of the science of the body and the science of photo-making. Nalla Pilla (Telugu:‘Little Dark Girl’) records details of Aparna’s body, its shades and its textures. Drawn from a series of recollections and visible scars upon the body – perhaps resonant of violations, but also societal imbalances, unethical treatments – Aparna’s visualization of blemish and skin gradient coax the suppressed anxieties to light. Presented eventually as salt paper photographs housed in a self-contained, self-lit frame, the object becomes a vessel, enshrining the body as a sacred entity, using the skin as its language. The surface of the print, much like an outer layer, another skin, speaks of gradations of life’s experiences. Flesh as voice, as memory, as destiny; the speech acts of nodes, glands, ducts, folded into the tireless webbing of muscle, sinew, ligament tendon, cartilage – incising, etching, reciting. The parallel incarnation of a digital projection of performance presents the compulsive act of recounting all that’s in mind and speaks of the artist as a scripter, recorder, and emissary.

The creative process placed me in the roles of performer-spectator as I attempted to project the discomfort and trauma, the coercions of the external gaze and of the actions imposed upon me.

Aparna Nori, Artist Statement.

We ‘zoom out’ into the dialectic of suture/rupture in Philippe Calia’s delineation of the environmental damage, the trauma wreaked by extractive commercial mining, including for the very elements used in digital imaging technology. His meta-textual narrative that reworks the unified grids of satellite surveys of the earth is a synoptic of brutal corporate profiteering, ecological and community destruction, and the sheer, unrelenting toxicity of particular industrial processes, underpinned by equally toxic economic practices. Like ooze from a septic wound, lethal poisons clog and overflow the shallow craters used for dumping waste and runoff. A dissonant counter-narrative is provided by way of a video work that ‘mines’ the terrain of interiority/memory via the harmonizing apparatus of nostalgia: family bonds, childhood wonder and dismay.

I reproduced and then reworked the smooth aerial images of these sites, washing and degrading them to produce new landscapes.

Philippe Calia, Artist Statement.

We immerse in the dialectic of visibility/invisibility as projected via Indu Antony’s work Ivar (Malayalam: ‘Them’, referring to people within one’s home/vicinity). Her initial probing of the relationship between self-expression and found objects – discarded photographs of anonymous women collected over time – led to a sustained project of salvaging occluded individual presences, vanished lives that can be acknowledged, valued and celebrated if someone persists in seeking them out. Printed in familiar oval format, much like the vintage portraits of our grandparents and other elders, these unknown genealogies are showcased as a series of salt prints, a medium that fades over time. But the eventual erasure of these already spectral subjects is actively countered by their material framing: strands of human hair that will remain after the gradual dissipation of the chemical surface, and the unique imprint of the person it once hosted.

… a form of presence purely dedicated to the inscription of absence, and as a witness to/testimonial of our existential fragility.

Indu Antony, Artist Statement.

We emerge into the dialectic of belonging through Arpan Mukherjee’s enigmatic works that urge us to reflect on the much-theorized relationship between photography and time. The ambiguous contours, bring to light a narrative of migration, and of remembering. They seem to ask, with regard to the photograph as a personal, familial and social document: Can there be an ‘event’ in the absence of a witness? Can there be ‘testimony’ in the absence of a listener? Do photographs reverse the flow of recollection, and actually block memory, or become a counter-memory? Are photographs fundamentally deceptive, always cheating us of our need for authentication – of the self, of the world? Is our understanding of an event transformed when our memory of it is overlaid by a photograph of it? Do the boundaries of our existent memory of an event extend beyond the edges of a photograph of the event?

The very process of image-making allows for its imperfections to be visible, and compels us to acknowledge that repeated manual printing never yields the same result. 

Arpan Mukherjee, Artist Statement.