Category: 45

Sohrab Hura: Mother

MoMA PS1

Exhibition Review by Zahra Amiruddin

Mother, Sohrab Hura’s first US survey, presents over 50 works spanning two decades of the artist’s shapeshifting practice. The exhibition at MoMa PS1 brings together photography, film, sound, drawing, painting, and text – shown together for the first time – to confront colonially imposed borders, the trauma of partition, changing ecosystems of the Indian subcontinent, and more. Zahra Amiruddin reflects on the fluidity of Hura’s experimental work, where memories, metaphors and histories blend to reveal the complex and multifaceted lives of images.

Zahra Amiruddin | Exhibition review | 13 Jan 2025

While sitting at my writing desk in Bombay, India, the room is engulfed by multiple musical notes resounding from videos emanating from photographer, filmmaker, and now, painter, Sohrab Hura’s digital walkthrough in New York. In this moment, the two concrete metropolises have converged via my laptop screen, as he guides the viewer through his first US survey show titled, Mother, at MoMa PS1.

The voices from the videos in the gallery space are barely discernible, but act as background scores to elongated thoughts finding a language through multiple forms. Spread across five rooms, Hura has carefully brought together the “many lives of images” that often arrive because of the existence of another. Spanning two decades of experimental practice, the viewer is invited to immerse themselves into the artist’s mind, to navigate between personal and political introspections. Even with a deeply intimate title such as Mother, Hura addresses colonially imposed borders, the trauma of the partition and the changing ecosystem of the Indian subcontinent. Here, the word Mother becomes a blanket under which harsh realities, lived experiences, vapour dreams, turmoil, humour, and history find comfort; caressed by thoughts of a resilient caregiver, blurring the lines between the artist’s and one’s own.

The viewer is first greeted by Hura’s photographic practice that laid the foundation of his future musings, making me contemplate the infinite nature of photography. Through a mere visit to the show, we are suddenly building a relationship with the artist, acutely aware of his changing styles as the years progress. For instance, the journalistic side of Hura is visible in his photographic work Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005–6) and the film Pati (2010/2020) which is based on a small, rural region of connected self-governing villages in Madhya Pradesh (Central India) which he visited on a bus tour in 2005. Over 15 years of visits, Hura’s interpersonal relationships, interactions and strong presence is felt in the visuals, as the arid, and piercing heat emits from the distant frames. What was once a lush forest, is now cracked land, desperately ploughed by its inhabitants. The protagonists are aware of Hura’s lens, coyly smiling and exchanging looks of joy – a phenomenon that is popular in a country like India, where the camera is often treated as a tool of ‘fame.’

As the years progress, in video works like Bittersweet (2019) and The Coast (2020), the awareness of the lens sheds, and Hura almost becomes incidental during the unravelling of moments. The narrative is still his, but the viewer is transfixed by the people in the visuals, often forgetting the presence of the one holding the camera. We see glimpses of Hura’s shadow in the sea or in reflective surfaces, and much like the photographer who moves through these moments like air, our eyes glide and settle on his disjointed memories. Hura’s own mother who lives with schizophrenia, emerges from the screen as if she were in the room, unperturbed by the resounding presence that a camera usually brings.

In the single-channel video from The Coast work, thousands of people sway with the rhythm of the waves, anticipating it crashing against their bodies, as they fling forward into its vastness. The film is slowed down, as if time has stretched through the eyes of the observer, who stands fixated in the crests and troughs of a dramatic sea. The animate water holds space for both, fact and fiction, as Hura emphasises the coastline as “a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.”

Through the show, we share secrets with the artist, who guides us through his urgent recollections, desires and humorous encounters in framed soft pastels and gouache paintings from Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (2022–ongoing) and Ghosts in My Sleep (2023–ongoing). They remind me of puzzles that we used to engage with as children, where we had to find an object often hidden in plain sight. Hura seems to be recording a memory but adding his own masala (spice) either in anticipation, or for sheer entertainment. Interestingly, the tactility of these memories can be felt while moving your fingers along the bookcover of Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed published by MACK which is soft, and gooey, much-like Hura’s paintings, that aren’t rigidly structured, and meander between experimentative geometries and compositions.

The balancing act between fictitious encounters and truth linger in undertones throughout Hura’s oeuvre. It almost feels like he’s playing a game of hide-and-seek with the viewer, who may or may not take his bait. Like in his video work The Lost Head and the Bird (2019), the jarring and uncomfortable images act as a parable that reflects the frenzied speed at which information –  whether real or fake – circulates on social media. The music by Hannes d’Hoine and Sjoerd creates an atmosphere of unease, and I find my breath stuck in my throat for quite a while before I remember to gulp. The video ends with a white screen, but the tension almost makes the viewer believe that there is more to come.

The mind is never quiet as we move through the exhibition, and a range of emotions find home in the recurring sound. In between silent imagery of winter-laden doorways and hidden snowballs in gentle palms, the viewer bears witness to the conflict and violence that exists in the northernmost part of the India Subcontinent- Kashmir. Despite struggles, protests, and powerful activism by its inhabitants, the land which is often referred to as Jannat (Heaven) finds itself battling for its freedom from the clutches of India, Pakistan and China since the dissolution of the British Raj in 1947. Using the melting snow as a metaphor, Hura moves away from the romanticised and highly picturesque, tourist-friendly imagery that is associated with Kashmir and instead documents the people’s gentleness, resilience and simultaneous struggle for existence. In fact I met Hura during one of his long stints in the Chillai Kalan (harsh cold) of 2018, and noticed that his approach is characterised by being present and mindful, whether with or without the camera.

Hura is a photographer who is on a quest to record, but simultaneously gets tired by the static nature of the medium. In his recent ongoing work Timelines, acrylic gesso drawings adorn each part of corrugated cardboard boxes. Much-like the show which is a labyrinth of the artist’s fragmented contemplations, the boxes change their narratives dependent on how they are placed – unfolding and revealing whispers each time. Hura isn’t interested in linear narratives, which also speaks to the elastic propensity of thought.

If the viewer is familiar with Hura’s photographs, they will notice the recurring character of The Mother – Hura’s mother – appearing and disappearing across the walls. One might even argue that this survey is truly an extension of their relationship, which has also been delicately explored in the pages of his books Life Is Elsewhere (2015) and Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside (2018). Anchored by a familial thread that would assumingly shape a lot of his contemplations, in Mother, the artist is vulnerable as well as aware. The works in the survey are suspended between past, present and an unravelling future, ensuring that while we visit Hura’s world, we are acutely aware of our own. ♦

Sohrab Hura: Mother runs at MoMA PS1 until 17 February 2025. 

—
Zahra Amiruddin is an independent writer, photographer and lecturer of photography. Her areas of interest include ethnographic studies, astronomy, personal narratives, and family histories. She is part of 8.30, a photography collective of nine women working with the visual medium across India.

Images:

1-Sohrab Hura, The Lost Head and the Bird, 2019. Video (colour, sound). 10:13 min. Photo: Steven Panecassio

2>6-Installation views of Sohrab Hura: Mother. Photo: Steven Paneccasio 

7&8-Sohrab Hura, Bittersweet, 2019. Video (colour, sound), 13:48 min

9-Sohrab Hura, The green dress, 2022. Soft pastel on paper. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

10-Sohrab Hura, Untitled from the series Snow, 2015–ongoing. Inkjet print. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

11-Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2020. Video: colour, 17:27 min. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

12-Sohrab Hura, Remains of the day, 2024. Soft pastel on paper. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

13>15-Sohrab Hura Untitled from The Songs of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer, 2013–ongoing. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

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• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect.

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries.

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto.

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous R. Dahmani.

Grow It, Show It!

Museum Folkwang

Exhibition review by Song Tae Chong

At Museum Folkwang, GROW IT, SHOW IT! investigates the relationship between hair, identity and gender performance across cultures. Spanning 150 years of photographic history, from Victorian cartes de visite to TikTok screenshots, the exhibition presents hair as both personal expression and a political symbol. Drawing on lived experience and cultural movements – feminism, queer identity, civil rights, and post-colonial struggles – Song Tae Chong charts the shifting significance of hair over the course of time.

Song Tae Chong | Exhibition review | 28 Nov 2024

One of my favourite sets of childhood memories is of my grandmother and I. Every morning before I went to school, she would carefully sit me down in front of the fire that she had built in our living room. My socks would be hanging on the smoke screen, warmed for my always too cold feet. Out came her comb, and she would carefully part my hair down the middle, quickly putting my hair into one of three hairstyles: a ponytail, two long braids down my back, or my personal favourite, one long braid starting at the nape of my neck done in the traditional Korean style for young girls. She would either adorn my hair with a ribbon or barrettes, but would always tie up my long strands with hair elastics that had big plastic balls attached. They would sit on my head, like a crown of precious plastic gems. The daily ritual that my grandmother and I had ended once I entered my preteen years and embarked on my own path of hair self-discovery.

When I braid my own hair now, although it is never as neatly and symmetrically arranged as when she did, I think of her and these moments we had, ones that I knew she had with her own grandmother. It was those memories that came flooding back as I opened the pages of the sprawling catalogue produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, GROW IT, SHOW IT! A Look at Hair from Arbus to TikTok by Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany.

Early on in the exhibition, Hoda Afshar’s triptych of images from the series Turn (2022) depicting women both braiding and holding hair, the braids both ordered and fragile as tendrils escape their pattern and are blown by the wind, speaks to its prevailing themes: connection and community. The subject of hair is explored through a variety of media, from art photographs to images from fashion and advertising as well as anonymous vernacular photographs. These images speak to the ways in which every day people use hair as a means of identity formation and assertion, cultural and social connection, whether for personal, social and political reasons and, of course, for aesthetics.

Spanning approximately 150 years of photographic activity, the catalogue also situates hair within historical contexts. Highlighting queer, feminist, post-colonial, and oppositional politics as well as conventional beauty standards and representations, the photographs assembled show how all of these movements have shaped and reshaped our understanding of hair as visual culture. The catalogue and exhibition serve as both an overview of hair as style and as political and cultural communication. Led by Thomas Seelig and Miriam Bettin, it is an ambitious and expansive curatorial endeavour utilising a wide array of representations of hair. Cartes de visite showing flowing locks of Victorian era hair and screenshots from TikTok refer to the long-standing relationship between hair as the subject of photography and image culture.

Punctuating a diverse and extensive survey of images are critical essays, placing these works within discourses that help to anchor them within a critical context. Lori L. Tharps’ essay “Hair I am” speaks to the legacy of disruption as well as cultural erasure via hair within the history of African people, both as colonised in situ as well as in the forced diaspora of the circum-Atlantic slave trade. Broken lineages, broken cultures, erasure of community building and status symbols, all of this played out in the politics of hair. She writes, ‘For better or worse, the hairstyles worn by African American people, from the 18th century through modern times, continued to signal a person’s status in society. From their politics to their profession, Black hairstyles supposedly said it all.’ Many of the featured works help to illustrate this idea. In a photograph from the archives of The Awa Women’s Group at the Bopp Social Center, a group of women are shown reading and laughing together, each with a unique head wrap as adornment and personal expression of style. A photograph of Angela Davis, with her afro, show how the disruption of attempts to control and tame Blackness played a pivotal role in political movements. The series by Nakeya Brown Sof-m-Free, Afro Curls, X-Possessions: Black Beauty Still Lives (2020/2024) depict objects of self-care, the material culture of black beauty and the symbolic codes understood and shared amongst black women as well as the impact that these products and their packaging had on beauty standards.

GROW IT, SHOW IT! also looks at the importance of hair and its relationship to identity and gender performance across different cultures. Paul Kookier’s Untitled 2020 is both a photographic abstraction and stark depiction of male body hair, to be viewed as a symmetrical form while at the same time challenging the visual culture of male body representation. Images from Satomi Niyoung’s ’70s Tokyo LONG HAIR INVERTED, itself a study on the typology of the hairstyles of the time, suggests the disappearing self, in silhouette or as the inverted image, only distinguished by the outline and shape of hair.

GROW IT, SHOW IT!  with its various points of emphasis invites the viewer to think again at the photographs that they have looked at, providing essential frameworks for interpretation. The project obliges viewers to read the semiotics of hair with renewed perspectives, across contexts and time. Viewers are invited, even nudged, to look closer, to probe deeper, to survey the wide array of photographs presented. The images also invite nostalgia and moments of levity. As historical and social and cultural indicators and signifiers, these representations of hair or even its absence within certain visual cultures ask us to reconsider its place in our own lives and how we construct meaning. ♦

GROW IT, SHOW IT! A Look at Hair from Arbus to TikTok runs at Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, until 12 January 2025

—
Song Tae Chong is a Berlin and New York based photography curator, advisor, and writer. Her research focus is on postcolonial visual culture, epistemologies of memory and documentary photography. She is currently a Trustee of the Martin Parr Foundation and teaches photography and theory at UE Berlin. 

Images:

1-Hoda Afshar, “Untitled #4”, from In Turn, 2022. Courtesy Milani Gallery, Meeanjin/Brisbane © Hoda Afshar 

2-Chaumont-Zaerpour, Untitled, 2023. Published in The Gentlewoman

3-Dorothea von der Osten, Untitled, 1950s

4-Anna Ehrenstein, Western Girl, 2017

5-Suffo Moncloa, Gucci / The Face Issue 9, 2021

6-Graciela Iturbide, Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora, Mexico, 1979

7-Viviane Sassen, “Kine”, 2011, from Parasomnia. Courtesy Stevenson Gallery © Viviane Sassen

8-Paul Kooiker, Untitled (Hercules), 2020. Courtesy tegenboschvanvreden, Amsterdam © Paul Kooiker

9-Nakeya Brown, “Sof-n-Free” from X-Pressions: Black Beauty Still Lifes, 2020

10-Torbjørn Rødland, Legs and Tail, 2020

11-August Sander, Secretary at Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, 1931/1982. © The Photographic Collection/SK Foundation for Art and Culture – August Sander Archive, Cologne; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 

12-Tessica Brown, Gorilla Glue Girl, 2021. TikTok Reel, 59 seconds

13-Thandiwe Muriu, Camo 2.0 4415, 2018

14-Helmut Newton, Courrèges, French Vogue, 1970. © Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin

15-Rineke Dijkstra, Almerisa, Wormer, the Netherlands February 21, 1998

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• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect.

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries.

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto.

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous R. Dahmani.

Paris Photo 2024

Top five fair highlights

Selected by Alessandro Merola

Paris Photo, the photography world’s “north star” event, has returned to mark its territory under the vaulted dome of the Grand Palais. It opens a new chapter in the fair’s history, boasting a revised layout, expanded sections, smart curatorial interventions and fresh visual branding. Amidst a growing emphasis on contemporary practice, not to mention multiple Surrealist nods to celebrate the art movement’s 100th birthday, works inspired by the land and city provide much contemplation. Here are five standout displays from the fair’s 27th edition – selected by 1000 Words Assistant Editor, Alessandro Merola.

Alessandro Merola | Fair highlights | 07 Nov 2024 | In association with MPB

1. Mark Ruwedel, Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies
Large Glass Gallery

Orchestrating selections from Mark Ruwedel’s conceptually ambitious and ongoing four-part epic, this installation by Large Glass Gallery delivers an impactful meditation on the fraught relationship between the natural environment and economic expansion, the inevitable consequences of which are never far from view. Various vantage points onto Los Angeles are offered here – from its rivers and canyons to the desert and Western edge – revealing not only the places nature and humanity intersect, but where the artist encounters history. Although Ruwedel is very much committed to, and working through the lineage of, the American New Topographic aesthetic (Ed Ruscha’s gasoline stations and Lewis Baltz’s industrial parks are amongst the seminal works at this edition), his work is not derivative nor daunted by the past (even if it is haunted by it). Seizing in their austere, elemental beauty, these hand-printed pictures quietly draw you in, inviting you to find evidence of human traces on the landscape, whether through a discarded water bottle or old train track that hisses at you as the wind sweeps through its bended edges. There are the blazed trees of Burnt too, a small portfolio Ruwedel made in the aftermath of the 2022 fires. They are as much onlookers to the contesting of wildness as we are.

2. Ester Vonplon, I See Darkness
Galerie S.

The narratives contained within the land are also startlingly evoked in Ester Vonplon’s display with Galerie S., which offers one of the most unique viewing experiences in the reinvented Emergence section upstairs. It comprises new and eye-catching experiments from the series I See Darkness, for which the Swiss artist turned a disused tunnel, once the entrance to the Safien Valley in Switzerland, into a darkroom of sorts, utilising light-sensitive paper to transcribe the alchemical rhythms of darkness, nature and time. Developed across days, sometimes months, the resultant images bear an irresistible range of shapes, colours, textures and moods. Shown here in an appropriately black booth, separated by a 10-metre-long unique piece produced in the tunnel, they appear frail, fleeting yet also lucid, bearing a dreamy density and layering of elements which seems to embolden nature – a nature which Vonplon has indeed let back in. Thus commendable are the ways in which the artist has submitted herself to a collaborative and unpredictable practice that is deeply rooted in her relationship with her local environment. Vonplon sees through it, listens to it, learns from it. Vonplon reminds us to follow suit.

3. Sakiko Nomura, Träumerei
Galerie Écho 119

Galerie Écho 119’s representation of the Sakiko Nomura continues to impress at this small but special solo presentation. It marks the first time the Träumerei series has been exhibited in its entirety outside the Japanese artist’s native country, albeit with selected prints only viewable upon request. There is also the opportunity to experience a delectable portfolio of collotypes, rich in grayscale and deep in jet-black, printed by Benrido this summer. The allure of this work lies in the fact one can enter it at any point, and follow it in any direction, in turn attempting to thread together a loose story through Nomura’s spliced images of skylines, landscapes, flowers, animals and sitters in repose. The combinations tease out tensions between interiority and exteriority, nature and artifice, reality and illusion, yet simultaneously resist any clarity on where the lines are drawn. Nomura’s is a multifaceted world, lit by a pale moon, a dreamwork. No matter how close you get, these vestiges feel somehow distant, wrapped in thought, clouded in a state of reverie. They are the last witnesses of moments that would otherwise be lost forever; or never happened at all.

4. Antony Cairns, E-ink Screens
Intervalle

Making a star turn at Intervalle is Antony Cairns, who, too, probes the realm of (science) fiction. One must crane one’s neck to view the artist’s latest so called “e-ink” works, which are encased in individual Perspex boxes. Here, Cairns has hacked into, and uploaded images onto, e-readers, subsequently fixing ink – or, indeed, trapping time – on the screens. They record urban scenes – architecture, tunnels, signs et cetera – from cities including Shanghai, Tokyo, Los Angeles and London. Although the captions indicate where each image was taken, experienced as a whole, any distinctions between locales collapse under the grimy, gloomy glow of megapolis sky. They turn into the same cities, unknown cities and on-the-brink-of-becoming bygone cities. Whilst Cairns’ practice has a strong affinity with digital technology (he is also launching two limited-edition books at the fair, produced using a RISO machine and Sony’s discontinued Mavica camera, respectively), these images, with their etch-like aesthetic, seem to stretch even further back in time. One feels that the artist is almost stealing from the past to give to the future. There is, of course, something very cynical about his decision to encase the screens behind glass, like remnants, or fossils. Cairns asks: whose utopia now?

5. Denis Malartre, Les Objectales
Bigaignon

Despite the irony of viewing them in a commercial setting, given the ethos of France’s late 1960s Supports/Surfaces school which the late Denis Malartre riffed off, the clinical approaches of the late Parisian photographer make the Bigaignon booth – located in the dynamic Prismes section – a succinct, sensual statement on materiality. Borne out of ‘exasperation’, these 50 pared-down prints from the 1986–88 series Les Objectales, elegantly mounted in white-wooden frames, depict bits of paper affixed to the corners of a Parisian apartment, as well as strips hanging from the ceiling. The depth of field is shallow and the focus is minimal, bringing to attention the interplay and paradoxes of light and shadow – that is, the latter existing only in the presence of the former, yet defined by its complete absence. They are, simply and deconstructed, a set of formal orientations across surfaces, revealing not only the medium’s physicality and fabrication, but also, somehow, its aura. With these highly portable, repeatable image-objects implying infinite reiterations, we find Malartre’s fixation with photography above all else. ♦

Paris Photo runs at the Grand Palais until 10 November 2024.

 

 

 

 

—
Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

Images:

1- Mark Ruwedel, “Sunken City” (2017), from Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies. Courtesy Large Glass Gallery

2-Mark Ruwedel, “Big Tujunga Wash #15” (2018), from Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies. Courtesy Large Glass Gallery

3>5-Ester Vonplon, “Untitled” (2024), from I See Darkness. Courtesy Galerie S.

6>7-Sakiko Nomura, “Untitled” (2017), from Träumerei. Courtesy Akio Nagasawa Gallery and Galerie Écho 119

8-Antony Cairns, “LDN4 #20” (2024), from E-ink Screens. Courtesy Intervalle

9-Antony Cairns, “TYO2, MAVICA #107” (2024), from MaViCa CTY (Mörel Books, 2024). Courtesy Mörel Books

10>11-Denis Malartre, “Untitled” (1988), from Les Objectales. Courtesy Bigaignon

1000 Words favourites

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• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect.

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries.

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto.

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous R. Dahmani.

The 9th Singapore International Photography Festival

In Search of Lost Time

Festival review by Kong Yen Lin

Loosely inspired by Marcel Proust’s epic modernist classic, The 9th Singapore International Photography Festival, under the title In Search of Lost Time, considers photography as a carrier of both personal and national identities. Featuring FX Harsono’s Keeping the Dream, which confronts ethnic subjugation in Indonesia through archival portraits of Chinese Indonesian children; Liu Bolin’s Seeing the Invisible, presenting staged self-portraits that merge him with urban landscapes; and Mingalaba: A Journey Through the Myanmar Photo Archive, curated by Kirti Upadhyaya, which intertwines public and private narratives of Burmese life through family portraits and civilian records. The festival surfaces involuntary gaps in history, memory and documentation, holding a mirror up to the process of self-examination itself, Kong Yen Lin writes.

Kong Yen Lin | Festival review | 31 Oct 2024

Interposed between physical reality and representation, photographs are often carriers of biographies, be it the self or the nation, which germinate in varying social contexts bearing new meanings for their beholders. The biennial Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF) is an intensification of this capacity for introspection. In surfacing photography’s layered possibilities vis-à-vis the medium’s manifestations as photobook, research data, archival records, and vernacular keepsakes, it prompts deeper thought about the sociocultural fabric of Singapore and our ever- changing identities in an age where visibility, memory, time and space are constantly being redefined.

Framed by a curatorial direction loosely inspired by Marcel Proust’s epic modernist classic In Search of Lost Time (1913), bodies of works presented similarly grappled with the protean nature of memory as frozen or compressible, allowing revisiting and reflection, or fluid and meandering, changing and reshaping as new interpretations are added to them.

A fitting primer to the festival is Keeping the Dream, a festival commission featuring Indonesian contemporary artist FX Harsono, which asserted the inherent violence in photography when being deployed as an apparatus for ethnic profiling and subjugation. Known for his politically charged works which examine identity through a personal lens, Harsono critiques the long-standing institutional discrimination and oppression of the Chinese minority community in Indonesia (of which he is a member). Taking centerstage is a typology of over 100 archival facial portraits showing anonymous Chinese Indonesian children, ranging from toddlers to pre-teens, extracted from official identification documents dating from early to late 1990s which he had been salvaging since a decade ago. They allude to state policies during Former President Suharto’s New Order regime that required ethnic Chinese Indonesians to undergo onerous proof of citizenship, as well as measures which suppressed the expression of Chinese identity, such as banning the public use of Chinese names and forcing civilians to adopt Indonesian ones.

Together with a series of photo assemblages juxtaposing ID documents with found images of familial bliss, Harsono projects his imagination of a childhood unfettered by prejudice and surveillance that might have elided most children of that generation. The absence of textual labels providing translation support for the documents rendered in Dutch or Bahasa Indonesia, echo the silences of a community facing erasure. Yet the artist’s act of resurfacing these records and reinterpreting them with personal interventions stood in defiance of this painful period in history from being forgotten. Reflecting on the Singaporean context, a city state with a population comprising 76 percent ethnic Chinese, the governance of Chinese identity, language and culture had also been instrumentalised and calibrated to balance delicate geopolitics of its position within the Malay Archipelago, and the need to remain connected to China’s economic success.

The exploration of identity as a sociopolitical construct continues in Seeing the Invisible, a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Liu Bolin featuring 11 works from his ongoing Hiding in the City and Target series. Conceived using painting, performance and photography, these staged self-portraits depict Bolin literally blending into the backdrops of selected landscapes. Adopting the visual metaphor of invisibility, they provoke thought on the marginality of identity and memory arising from tensions between insider and outsider, individualism and collectivism. While Bolin’s impetus to begin Hiding in the City originated in 2005 as personal protest sparked by the government’s forced demolition of his artist studio in preparations for the Beijing Olympics, over the years, his choice of canvases and collaborators have come to reflect a far-ranging humanistic concern. For one, Cancer Village (2013) involved the artist collaborating with over 20 villagers in Shandong province facing the threat of downstream industrial pollution, to stage an act of camouflage against a desolate wheat field, with the aim of raising awareness around the social costs of economic progress. As part of a festival commission, Bolin had also created two new site-specific artworks in Singapore, poised against the touristic landmark of the Merlion Park and a bustling Hawker Center in Chinatown.  

The latter was particularly meaningful for Bolin, who felt it “embodied the historical lineage of Chinese migration across the world” [1]. His profile as a Chinese artist intermingles with the cultural politics of Singapore’s Chinatown, which is an anomaly from most Chinatowns in the world typically catered for the Chinese minority of the populace. During 19th to mid-20th Century British colonial rule, Chinatown was a self-sustaining ethnic enclave demarcated for incoming Chinese immigrants. However, in post-colonial Singapore, its significance evolved to embrace the nation’s multicultural outlook, and developed into a site of active discourse on gentrification and heritage preservation. With globalisation, complexities of identity, memory, and integration came into sharp relief when Chinatown relived its role as a point of congregation for the post-1990 wave of new Chinese immigrants to Singapore [2]. Furthermore, hawker centres are also unique social spaces in Singapore that stand for the melting pot of diverse food cultures.

Expanding this dialogue with the cultural politics of space was Mingalaba: A Journey Through the Myanmar Photo Archive  / မင်္ဂလာပါ: မြန်မာ့ဓာတ်ပုံမော်ကွန်း၏ဖြတ်သန်းခြင်းခရီး , a photographic display curated by Kirti Upadhyaya. Inserted into shop displays, advertisement niches and restaurant walls across a cluster of malls in the city’s central district, doubling up as bustling enclaves for the sizeable Burmese community in Singapore, the archival images represent a historical counterpoint against the flux of activities in the spaces. The mix of images ranging from mid to late 20th Century vernacular snapshots, family photos, studio portraits, and civilian records of national milestones such as the first independence speech in Yangon in 1948, not only crisscross terrains of personal and social memory, but also blur boundaries between the private and public. Collections by two of the earliest local photographers U Than Maung and U Aung San were especially captivating, offering a rare glimpse into identity formation and self-fashioning in post-colonial Myanmar.

The Myanmar Photo Archive was founded almost a decade ago by Austrian photographer Lukas Birk when Myanmar was loosening up from decades of oppressive military rule, with the aim of creating a repository of social and personal memory. The display posits deeper contemplation on the photograph as a construct of contextual interpretation, and its role in historical imagination and retelling. Within Yangon’s highly restricted and fraught media landscape, it entails greater democratic access to the past, though navigating with silences, absences and information gaps remains a perennial challenge.

This atomising of the stream of life into discrete, manageable elements to be collected, saved and shared, extends beyond traditional archives into the virtual multiverse of social media, as examined in Pierfrancesco Celada’s solo exhibition. It comprised three bodies of works When I feel down I take a train to the Happy Valley, One a Day and Instagrampier, which were executed in tandem during the time he lived in Hong Kong from 2014 to 2022. Bearing witness to recent momentous events in the city such as the Umbrella Movement and the global pandemic, Celada poses an observation into psychosocial realities of one of the world’s most densely populated urban metropolises. His approach is gently curious and non-didactic. Images seized from spontaneous moments on the streets, appear enigmatic and open-ended, inviting audiences to project their own interpretations. Instagrampier (2016-2021), a series which unfolded within a cargo pier on the west side of Hong Kong island, stood out in particular for its wry take on how the gaze of content sharing platforms such as Instagram, imposes a visual logic to the world of images through approval metrics. While initially setting out to document the constant streams of Instagrammers posing for selfies at sunset with similar stances and antics, Celada soon found himself caught in the loop of repeating the same ritual of recording others record themselves. “My works are self-portraitures of how I lived,” he said in an interview [3]. This calls to mind theorist Nathan Jurgenson’s remark of the social photo as ‘a documentary consciousness that turns users into a tourist of their own experience’ [4].

The power of the photographic gaze to objectify, possess, and turn life into something relatable and consumable is explored through Garden City: Remix Edition, a collaborative project by DECK and ArtSpace LUMOS that features four photographers – Woong Soak Teng and Marvin Tang from Singapore as well as Kim Sunik and Lee Jin Kyung from South Korea. The exhibition appraises the dialectics between humans and nature in urban living environments, and the many contestations and contradictions that arise from our ambition to document, tame, and co-exist with the natural world. Dialogues that arise between the works ultimately point towards the embodied experience of nature and the inseparability between nature and culture. By contemplating how ecological relationships are in fact socially constituted, the show summons deeper consideration on the types of attachment and values that undergird the relations one has with the self and with others.

Collectively, the festival surfaces involuntary gaps in history, memory and documentation, holding a mirror up to the process of self-examination itself. It reinforces the ever-critical role of art and photography to liberate from the buried world of spent consciousness, the many alternate pathways to the future to which habit has made us blind. ♦

Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF) runs until 24 November 2024.

—
Kong Yen Lin is Assistant Curator, the National Museum of Singapore. Aside from her professional practice, she is a researcher and writer focusing on Singapore’s modern photography history from the 1950s to 80s, with an interest in examining the wider systemic frameworks governing the development of visual culture.

References:

[1] Interview with the author, 16 October 2024.

[2] Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Lily Kong, “Singapore’s Chinatown: Nation building and heritage tourism in a multiracial city” in Localities, Volume 2, 2012. https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2250, [accessed 27 October 2024].

[3] Interview with the author, 25 October 2024.

[4] Nathan Jurgenson, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (London & New York: Verso, 2020).

Images:

1-FX Harsono, Keeping the Dream No.3, 2024.

2- Installation view of FX Harsono,  Keeping the Dream No.3. © Toni Cuhadi. Courtesy Singapore International Photography Festival and DECK. 

3-Liu Bolin, Chinatown. Performance: 11-22 October 2024.

4-Liu Bolin, Chinatown Complex Hawker Centre. Performance: 11-22 October 2024.

5>7-Liu Bolin, Merlion Park. Performance: 11-22 October 2024.

8>10-The Myanmar Photo Archive

11>12-Pierfrancesco Celada, Instagrampier, 2021.

13-Pierfrancesco Celada, When I feel down I take a train to the Happy Valley, 2014-2022.

14-Marvin Tang, A Guide to Tree Planting.

15-Kim Sunik, Temporary Garden.

16-Woong Soak Teng, Some Pictures of Representation, 2018.

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