In Urdu, “guftgu” implies discussion, normally a dialogue that is charged with free-flowing whimsy. It’s an exchange where words cross courses with abandon, sensations converge, feelings meander and in some cases assemble into common points of reality. A similar energy streams through the 9 stand-alone chapters that form the eponymous new job by Offset Projects, an art initiative conceptualised by artist, manager and editor Anshika Varma.As Varma describes, these chapters, held together in a cardboard box, “exist as zines of a deconstructed book”, where a handful of specialists of photography from South Asia “describe and refute the social history of their presumed identities”. The outcome isn’t a conclusive statement or̉a manifesto of shared goals. Rather, Guftgu catches a constellation of practices, where the individual and political collide and conflate with one another. At its most illuminating, it permits the audience to understand patterns that emerge like a fleeting comet. It charts familiar histories of suffering and redemption substantiated by the history of photography itself, especially by its origins in the violence of the colonial regime.Also read: A brand-new play about non-traditional relationships The job’s framing declaration comes from an observation by artist and author Amarnath Praful. The contemporary practice of photography presents, he states, a”crash of history … a system where one can obtain and consume images from numerous pasts– pictured pasts, speculative futures and instant present, all in one synchronised flux”. In his conversation with artist and designer Adira Thekkuveettil, he includes:”If our Instagram algorithm is operating in a particular way, we can view an Ansel Adams picture sharing the screen with images of the farmers’ protest in India … This overall absence of spatial and historic boundaries forces us to rearrange the method we understand images. “If such serendipitous juxtapositions make complex the viewer’s relationship with images, they provoke new methods
of seeing and discovery. Each job in Guftgu looks into identity, politics and history through a private lens. The objective is to recover and magnify information obscured by time and circumstance, to join the dots our eyes fail to see.Diwas Raja K.C., for instance, exhumes three household albums from the Nepal Photo Library to lay bare the mishaps of intellectual kinship between 3 singular women– Shashikala Sharma, Binda Pandey and Prativa Subedi. They were involved not only with the feminist movements of the 1960s, 1980s and 1990s, but also with trade unionism at the peak of the Cold War. Interleaved with photographs of Vladimir Lenin and Soviet-era ads, the private albums of these women’s visits to Moscow and Beijing become archives that surpass chronicling social history.Jaisingh Nageswaran, who matured in a village in Tamil Nadu, reanimates the forgotten legacy of his Dalit grandmother as he documents the worry and anger of the inhabitants in the Narmada basin displaced by the huge dam project. In contrast, Nida Mehboob’s deal with the Ahmadis of Pakistan informs the story of the community’s oppression. If Nageswaran’s wispy black and white images stimulate a poetic sense of pathos, an intimate proximity with his topics, Mehboob uses dramatic contrast of colours( rose petals and bloodstains)with texts from reports and pamphlets to conjure up a sense of menace.Cheryl Mukherji’s revisiting of her relationship with her mother in The Last Time is an enactment of individual sorrow. It’s a numeration that is impossible to accomplish in words alone. With each model of her last check out to her mom, memories can be found in the way of realities , and Mukherji winds up with a palimpsest instead, a liminal area where trauma is inscribed, erased, and went back to in an unending loop of repetition.Uma Bista, on the other hand, chooses a more direct visual language to highlight the embarrassments suffered by menstruating ladies in South Asia. Confined and bound to your house, the predicament of these
ladies is enacted as a perverse counterpoint by the buddy series of pictures of guys, naked and tied up, shorn of all dignity. Shock blunts the edginess.Arko Datto’s Dinos Of Hindustan likewise relies heavily on spectacle. As soon as you unfurl the(rather troublesome) folds of his section, you discover a facetious note from the” Institute for Contemporary Dinosaur Researches, Kolkata “. Its message is bleak and funny, if skin-deep. Arun Vijai Mathavan’s pictures of the land fills of Chennai and Ahmedabad extend the city style into the worlds of ecological destruction. Powerful on their own, these works feel a bit dissonant with the overarching visual field of Guftgu. That stated, the objective of the project is undoubtedly bold in its desire to experiment and engage with kind and material, with conversations about photography in South Asia, dialogues freed from the boundaries of academic community. There is much food for the mind and eye in every chapter. My preferred is
Nandita Raman’s They Live Where They Take Seed, where words decline altogether and the images do all the talking.(Guftgu, 3,000, is offered on www.offsetprojects.in.)Somak Ghoshal is a Delhi-based writer.Also read: Irma Vep is an artful meta revisit