Propositions for Fleeting Sights: In Conversation with Arko Datto

How does the documentary genre converse with vulnerability without objectifying it? How does it map the proliferation of precarity in its readings of a site over a period of time? What does it seek to convey? What does it eventually produce? 

Shunyo Raja (Kings of a Bereft Land) began as an offshoot of a larger body of work on the river Ganga by Arko Datto. It eventually grew into an independent project when the artist began studying the last stretches of the Ganga as it connects to the Bay of Bengal, making space for multiple focal points and a layered methodology. Datto’s proclivity for the longue durée in photographic projects allows him to develop and communicate the documentary in photography with a sensitivity that accords climate change the space to unfold in his images as it does on the ground. Having worked extensively on other long-term projects based in the Indian subcontinent, he retained a similar approach for Shunyo Raja, returning to different islands on the delta to make photographs multiple times over several years.

In this conversation, Datto touches upon the inherent corruption that plagues political chartings of a site such as the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta. The artist looks at how certain cyclical notions of invisibility, identity and power define the multi-layered exigencies that the people living there inevitably face alone. He explains how he spent time studying the cartography of the region in order to gain a better sense of what he would be expected to confront. With references to the work of scholars such as Timothy Morton, Datto brings in wider conceptual frameworks on the climate crisis, expanding the site-specific nature of his project to a scale of planetary pertinence.

The exhibitions at Light Work in Syracuse, New York and Fotomuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands extend different iterations of Shunyo Raja, playing host to varied audiences and affectivities. Datto imagines that the work will eventually take on other forms as well; however, in its current state, it continues to amass and record the starkness of these worlds. As curatorial propositions for and from the photographic, the exhibitions situate the site of encounter for climate change as one that continues to offer new contexts of viewing and consideration. 

Arko Datto explores forced migration, techno-fascism, surveillance in the digital panopticon, disappearing islands, nocturnal realms and psychosomatic stress of captive animals in his practice. His subjects vary, but together they form threads of inquiry into the existential dilemmas of our times. By incorporating and developing diverse visual languages, narratives and styles, Datto pushes the boundaries of both still and moving images. Recent shows have been at SFO Museum (San Francisco), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin) and Museum für Angewandte Kunst (Frankfurt). He also co-curated the Chennai Photo Biennale 2021.

(Featured image: Installation view of Shunyo Raja [Kings of a Bereft Land] at Light Work. Image courtesy of the artist.)

This conversation was recorded on 8 May 2023.

In case you missed the first part of the conversation, watch it here. To learn more about Arko Datto’s practice, revisit his conversation with Sukanya Baskar in which he discusses his projects Dinos of Hindustan and Captive Cams.

All images courtesy of the artist and Daylight Blue Media.