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Curated by Saloni Jaiwal
‘Walking Past’ engages with how artists reconfigure spaces through lived history foregrounding mobility in their personal inquiry and collective experience. The process of image-making is inextricably linked to embodied spatiality that that shapes the geographies we create, destroy and recreate. However, the resultant imagery (it is multi-sensorial) not only consists of our immediate encounters but is an aftereffect of its negotiation with the existing archival impulse and the public imagination.
Is it a matter of memory - cultural memory ? - that suddenly comes flashing back and then fades out the other second, if left unremembered. It's a slippery fleeting being that is constantly on the verge of an escape from our hold. It is in essence a thing that desires.
And, to remember is to become a portal into a world unknown or lost otherwise - a world of many worlds inside it that reshape our knowledge systems. Recollection becomes an act of rescuing and re-animating "what once was" but through a recall of the body's immersion and an exchange of imprints with the inhabited space. "The living body creates or produces its own space," and is conversely governed by the structures of space itself, notes Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1991).
To think of movement or mobility as inherent to acts of place making as we navigate through shared and contested spaces, offers possibilities of alternative forms of representation. The exhibition calls attention to a phenomenology of spatial experience that counters dominant paradigms of tracing relationships between rootedness and placelessness while forging personal archives grounded in the lived space.
- Saloni Jaiwal