Sight, Scene and Staging: Spectatorship and Scenography in the Archives

Elizabeth Edwards, in Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image (2012), wrote about how “…the understanding of photographs cannot be contained in the relation between the visual and its material support but rather through an expanded sensory realm of the social in which photographs are put to work.” Edwards explains that as we shift from looking solely at meaning to also considering matter, content and social processes; photographs demand a sensitive approach that acknowledges their tactility as sensory objects in time and space, comprised by and through social relations. 

Thinking about images along similar lines, Spectatorship and Scenography in the Archives by the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, opened to the public at Shridharani Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi from 3–12 February 2023. Presenting a collection of photographs from their theatre and photographic archives, the exhibition showcased the ability of spectatorship to galvanise the historical and commemorative tendencies within a landscape, its people and its possible futures. Positioning frameworks from the two fields, it focused on five interlinked bodies of work that were made in the subcontinent between the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The display foregrounded the image as a moment in time, harnessing reality through multiple stagings that encompassed in their temporalities acts of making, viewing and revisiting the photograph and its “unmoored” context(s).

Drawing attention to the transient nature of spectatorship, the exhibition set forth the questions: Can the image and what it seeks to record be interrogated at different moments in time? Can the maker, subject and subjectivity obtain and occupy a simultaneity that can be renegotiated in the current moment? Organised into two interconnected sections, the exhibition invited us to consider the historically evolving expanses of two cities—Agra and Delhi—with synonyms of site and place as key variables in their photographic mapping, providing viewers with routes to encounters with history-making.

Within a “revisionist inscription of space”, Agra unfolded through three bodies of work: Dr John Murray’s photographs of the Taj Mahal (1858–62), stills from performances of Habib Tanvir’s Agra Bazaar (1950s–1990s), and images from the Alkazi Theatre Photography Grant 2022 awardee Kush Kukreja’s work, Yamuna Local Stories (2022). 

Murray, an assistant surgeon with the East India Company, attempted to document the Taj Mahal from all angles, making it possible to read a vigilance of the Empire. His photographs offer a sense of ordering in the repeated attempts to establish a visual regime that could both overwrite and restructure the archive and its ways of looking. Murray’s images of the Taj Mahal detail its environment and various architectural facades in a manner that gives rise to questions of how images counter monumentality, history and public space: Does the image transmogrify into a cartographic document here? Does it also retain the vestige as a conductor of memory in the present?

Photographs of Habib Tanvir’s Agra Bazaar, a play first staged in 1954, reflect a post-independence optimism woven around Nazeer Akbarabadi’s verses. The different elements of theatre, script and dialogue build the stage as a conveyor of the city as it is created through characterisations to emerge as a terrain enlivened by a certain energy of the everyday. The faces, bodies and enactments made visible through these photographs chart a composition with an aspiring posterity, brought alive through the social document of the theatre.

Responding to popular depictions of the Yamuna as a polluted, foamy site, Kush Kukreja’s Yamuna Local Stories asserts a direction away from the linearity of such representation. Looking at the visual lacunae in research documents that survey the river, Kukreja provides photographic records, using self-portraiture as a method—the methodology in the papers serving as his script and the river as his stage. As a reworking of cultural memory around the Yamuna, the work offers up alternative interpretations and new readings on residual ecologies of the river by entangling theatre and performance to re-evaluate the evidential in photography. Tracing the expansions and undulations of its banks and its trajectory, the work orchestrates a dialogue between performative gestures, the representation of riverine memories and an imploding cityscape, grappling with the aftermath of industrial usurping.

In the second section, the city of Delhi opens as a “shifting visual territory”, spanning two sets of images taken eighty years apart, across pre- and post-colonial periods. Parsi photographer Motivala’s photographs, drawn from his Delhi Durbar 1911 album, present the coronation of King George V, offering a glimpse into a spectacle observed through the gaze of a common man. As Motivala’s positionality as an image-maker takes shape, the camera follows the formation of a public struck by its own witnessing; it opens up the archive to contemporary re-contextualisations today, driven by his specific ways of seeing and navigating the proximity afforded by the apparatus.

Photographs of the work of Jana Natya Manch (Janam) in the industrial area of Jhandapur form the final sub-section in the exhibition. Demonstrating events around Safdar Hashmi Shahadat Diwas, they mark a socio-political moment for the documentary image. The selection of images on display offer a study of how spectatorship was changing alongside a fast-altering topography, and how demographics were evolving alongside growing aspirations toward new forms of collectivism. As a book-ending of the initial premise, the exhibition frames the Janam images within a narrative structure, creating a tangible genealogy within the history of Delhi. 

Bringing together multiple subjectivities, the act of making a photograph is activated in the way it is deployed and viewed through the context of the exhibition, and the claims that the latter performs and recognises. Through the motile presences of these images, the arena—of the landscape and the exhibition—both imagined and perceived, becomes an assemblage, pieced together through mobilities and fictions, displaced subjects and lines of sight. In its proposal to look differently at South Asian landscapes, Spectatorship and Scenography in the Archives locates the image within its own slickness, permitting the writing of new histories and palimpsestic modes of witnessing, extending beyond the colonial gaze into a study of how we see, covet and belong, impacting our inhabitations of the land.

To read more on parallel programmes to the India Art Fair, click here and here.
To read more on deptictions of the Yamuna, please click here and here.

To read more on Janam, click here.

All images by Vijay Azad. Images courtesy of the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.