Writing
as practice
ASAP | art
Access all published essays here.
As a researcher/writer for ASAP | art, I have been reading and writing around photographic practice in South Asia, following trajectories of the medium in the contemporary moment. I have been in conversation with practitioners and artists who have incorporated, challenged and dissected notions of the photographic through their inter-media practices. My essays look at ways in which the photograph has come to occupy a variety of spaces as an object of ephemera, as an accompaniment, as diaristic, as also harnessing the possibilities of fictive storytelling and archival remembrance.
The words we wrote in other years: My mother in her likeness, imaged
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This essay takes contiguous form with two simultaneous processes: one, an effort to preserve and organise photographs of my mother, separating them amidst a larger collection of other family photographs; and two, a re-writing of our shared memories of care and trauma through a series of conversations with her. It maps the critical dialogue between the ordered space of remembrance that often perseveres in family photographs and albums, and the disruptive process of archiving them in tenuous contexts, citing the imaginative capacities of orality in personal micro-histories. Incorporating poetics and creative prose in the form of repetition, refrain, free verse, and marginalia as disruptions that intersect an existing narrative maintained by the photographs, I look at the specificity of the medium as raw material—framing the family photograph as almost palimpsestic, with the capacity to evoke and indulge vulnerability, healing and transference. Taking the photograph as an object of memory—talismanic, commemorative, violent, unforgiving, evidentiary, malleable—this essay silhouettes my relationship with my mother and her memories against a landscape of loss, love, and the silences of familial trauma.
Look in all directions!
A review of the exhibition, Turning: On Field and Work
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Turning: On Field and Work was an exhibition curated by Vidya Shivadas, as part of Serendipity Arts Festival's 2023 edition. The exhibition was a gathering, an invocation, and an unfolding inquiry into forms of witnessing, collectivity, and the act of viewing as a critical and generative position. Anchored in material, medium, and curatorial thinking, it shaped a space of shared vulnerability—one that resisted verbosity in favor of the quiet sublime. Rooted in the complexities of contemporary South Asia, my essay engages with the weight and promise of artistic research, offering a site for reflection, confrontation, and world-building through the interwoven textures of practice and possibility.
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Projects / Processes (P/P) is an initiative launched by Serendipity Arts Foundation in 2017 to publish commissioned research essays, longform writing and in-depth criticism that explore the ideas and processes behind select curatorial projects at Serendipity Arts Festival.
TAKE Philanthropy | Issue 31​
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An essay commissioned by TAKE on Art magazine, looking at the works of Iranian photographer, Zahra Yazdani, showcased as part of her solo exhibition, Scripted Selves: Sutures of Signs and Symbols. Curated by Manan Shah, the exhibition showcased Yazdani’s formative experiments with analogue photography and slow making, along with her orchestrations on imaging a shifting morphology of the body.
One Tongue Over The Other: An exhibition by Akshay Bhoan at Lake, London
21 Jun 2024 – 27 Jul 2024
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Invited by the artist to contribute to a Reader for his show, I was keen to respond to the works on display by framing my text as a note-making gesture, speaking to various strands of memory, affect and belonging. Akshay Bhoan’s practice allies the relationship between text and image to create examinations of remembrance, language and resilience through a combination of photography, mixed media and installation. I wanted to emphasise the non-linearities of form, function and genre within Bhoan’s new body of work, while also experimenting with the same through my writing. I was curious to see what an alignment of poetry and prose would produce as a response to Bhoan’s works, continuing to evoke the granularity of the latter.
Tilting with the image
A review of Unframed: Discovering Image Practices in South Asia (2022)
TAKE Sustainability | Issue 29​
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A book review commissioned by TAKE on Art magazine for Unframed: Discovering Image Practices in South Asia (2022) edited by Rahaab Allana. Unframed presents some of the complex dimensions of South Asia-oriented lens-based media, specifically tracing the evolution of photography in the subcontinent from the nineteenth century to the present. Through intersecting trajectories, thirty-one texts, arranged in five distinct yet interdependent sections, examine the general history/particular meta-histories of the medium in our region, reflecting the depth of image practices in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar.
​Critical Collective - PhotoSouthAsia Young Writer's Award
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In the distancing enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic, a photograph produces death as an abstraction. The shifting intimacies of death have enabled a witnessing where the evidentiary nature of the photograph of the dead is at odds with its memorial tendencies. The endless reproducibility of the photograph is a slight to the singularity of death but in the absence of touch, the image is a veneer between the mourning and the mourned. The photograph of death enlists a spectacle but viewership is moulded into a witnessing that transcends spectatorship by a difference: culpability. The networked, appropriated image of death implicates everybody; authorship is uncertain, the original is but a mapping. Ways of seeing are ritualistic; in the visibilities produced by the confines of the pandemic, the site—of the photograph, of death—is reconvened each time with a transmogrification of publics. Instead of the iconicity of a few, the archival excess of the moment primes the photographic as a spatiality—sensitive, affective, and defiantly complex in its unravelling.
​Hakara Bilingual | Edition 14
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Narratives of the Partition document it as more than just a historic upheaval; even today, families relive the grief that it precipitated as a separation that seared through two nations. It continues to be remembered and documented in multiple, multicultural haptic manifestations, and in one such attempt to revisit retellings of the Partition handed down to him by his family, artist Amitesh Grover reads the familial against the grain, allowing for a ‘break’ in the cyclicality of grief and loss, especially in the ways in which it is described, articulated and imaged.
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In thinking about what the domestic swallows - as space, place, body, and name - this work creates what we felt might
possibly be the poetics of an inheritance that traces the relationship between mothers and daughters through specific rememberings. The verses are freeing, they follow a sensorial route of reaching and revisiting our mothers, allowing for a bleeding into of belonging and being. What definitions does conflict take on outside of its frowned-upon aggression and sighed-upon passivity? How does it encounter the intimacies of filial ties? Does it render itself meaningless, stuck in the echo chambers of routine and machination, torn between want and desirous need?
As an experiment in writing alongside with artist Shailee Mehta, the verses are rekindling of many (m)otherhoods - found, felt, fabricated across two lives, two daughters and several selves.
This essay examines the anxieties of the photograph of violence, pondering on how photographs of violent events/regimes/encounters are constantly moulding our future ability to respond, react and contribute. In beginning to think about photographs today, it asks – has the photographic image become inherently unknowable? As our collective and cultural experiences continue to be shaped not by events but by images of those events, we are finding ourselves in an ongoing series of confrontational encounters with the photographic. Occupying increasingly complex positions as spectators within rapidly growing networks of dissemination, it makes sense for us to question the knowability of the visual inundation of the ‘real’ through photographic encounters. How do we begin to comprehend the dimensions of our own desensitisation against the relentless nature of what surrounds and implicates us?
This reflective piece is a revisitation of (some of) my memories that feature plantains, woven into what is also a work-in-progress as I reflect on the medium of photography and what it means to me. Responding to 'still'-ness, this work is an attempt at expressing my deeply sentimental relationship with certain moments, landscapes, vocabularies and states of being that I now remember through photographs and their archival tendencies.
​TAKE Bengal | Vol 4, Issue 3
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Commissioned to write a critical review of the Venice Biennale 2019 with special focus on the India Pavilion for TAKE Bengal, guest edited by Ina Puri.