Sanya Gupta
In his series ‘Marriage’, John Stezaker merges different faces, forming a singular entity despite a visible seam.[2] In ‘Bilkul apni maa par gayi hai (You look/are exactly like your mother)’, I fit together fragments from uncannily identical photographs of myself, my mother and my maternal grandmother, to create one portrait. While we are roughly the same age, the studio photographs taken for their prospective arranged marriages are juxtaposed with my phone camera selfie in my university room. Symbolising the false assumption that I am exactly like them, this collage can be seen as a whole face despite visible separations.
Through Arpita Akhanda’s ‘A Veil of Memories IV’, I became interested in the physical process of paper weaving as a representation of my desire to construct my past to understand my present.[3] In the first collage of ‘Figure Out’, I carefully and methodically weave together parallel images of my mother and grandmother. In contrast, the second collage includes my current and childhood photographs, woven together but mixed up and placed less deliberately. While the parallels between past photographs are explicit and clear, the collage of my own present displays my inability to make similar sense of my current identity.
According to Barthes, if a photograph is undeniable proof of reality, then moving images represent something more transient.1 This idea led to the creation of collages edited and erased in real time to portray the past as something being reconstructed through my archival and understanding. These use the stop motion and erasure animation characteristic of Nalini Malani’s ‘In Search of Vanished Blood’[4] and ‘My Reality is Different’[5]. They serve as starting points for installations using the translation and overlay of physical, digital and audible elements to represent the interplay between the past and present in relation to generational patterns and individual identity. Large-scale projections create immersive photo albums involving a complex layered story of the past and present that is akin to Malani’s work.
In ‘Inheritance I’, screenprints of wedding photographs of my parents and grandparents are overlayed in a way that makes the separation of these indistinguishable to the viewer. The line animation of myself projected across these uses similarly bright colours, moving between aligning with and differentiating itself from past photographs. The physicality and detailed nature of the screenprints on fabric represent the past as something that has ended, to be looked back at and made sense of. These are juxtaposed with the simple, ephemeral and fluid figure symbolising the present and future full of potential, as an identity not yet fully formed. Both contradicting elements are tied together by loud music traditionally played in Hindu weddings in my family, that this figure is now dancing to alone.
In ‘Inheritance II’ and ‘in-between’, the animated figure, childlike in its hand-drawn quality, is formed by and attempts to shape itself into the moving collages. Over the collages and in the blank spaces in between, it repeatedly glitches, changes colour, and fails to both conform and evolve into someone new, stuck in an infinite loop of neither here nor there. This confusion eventually leads to the simple line bursting into a chaotic scribble, like a frustrated child refusing to colour within the lines. This is accompanied by sounds of camera clicks and album pages turning. This conventionally nostalgic soundscape is interrupted by jarring loud Hindu wedding music. This is a reminder that the past is not just stored within its photographic representations but is a tangible reality influencing the present. The projection of videos in a dark space creates the sense of in-between-ness felt in an identity created through generational patterns yet shifting into something new outside of them.
Bibliography
Arpita Akhanda. A Veil of Memories IV. 2023. Collage. Autograph, London.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Vintage Classics, 2020.
Malani, Nalini. In Search of Vanished Blood. 2012-20. Installation. Tate Modern, London.
My Reality is Different. The National Gallery, London, March 2, 2023-June 11, 2023. Exhibition.
Stezaker, John. Marriage XV. 2006. Collage. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
[1]Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Vintage Classics, 2020).
[2]John Stezaker, Marriage XV, 2006, collage, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
[3]Arpita Akhanda, A Veil of Memories IV, 2023, collage, Autograph, London.
[4]Nalini Malani, In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012-20, installation, Tate Modern, London.
[5]My Reality is Different, The National Gallery, London, March 2, 2023-June 11, 2023, Exhibition.