Curating the Contemporary Photograph: Tanvi Mishra on Moving Definitions | An Invitation To Re-View

Founded in 1970 with the aim of establishing photography as an artistic and creative discipline in its own right, the Rencontres d’Arles (formerly known as the Rencontres internationales de la photographie d’Arles) has long been considered a prestigious and expansive platform for the medium in the West. Acknowledging the need for a generative nexus for practitioners and enthusiasts of the medium, the festival introduced the Louis Roederer Discovery Award to engage with contemporary discourse in the field. With a constantly evolving model, Tanvi Mishra has curated this year’s exhibit. Titled Moving Definitions | An Invitation To Re-View, the show offers a dynamic curation of eleven artists as it explores the limits of how much the surface of a photograph can communicate. 

Coming from a long tradition of creating work and writing about documentary photography, Mishra initially wished to become a photojournalist. Having worked as the Photo Editor and Creative Director of The Caravan, a leading voice of political journalism in India, Mishra spoke about her disillusionment now with the notion of that “single image”: “Of course, there is a place for photojournalism, but I am more interested in alternative genres of the medium that provide us [with] new ways to discover old truths.” Recalling her editorial work on the publication PIX, Mishra references Amber Hammad’s Glocal (2012), a work that forced her to imagine photography beyond documentation. 

It is in the space beyond the evidentiary that the artists in Moving Definitions find photographic expression. Exploring myriad techniques such as alternative printing processes, 3D scanning and photogrammetry, as well as incorporating sculpture, performance and video, the works on display prompt viewers to look beyond what the photograph shows. The exhibition collectively presents a series of strategies that challenge and complicate a monolithic interpretation, highlighting the significant role of personal memory and contextual interpretation as essential lenses for engaging with them. 

Exhibited in the Église des Frères Prêcheurs, Mishra acknowledges the delight as well as the challenges of working in an unconventional space as she plays with the spatial interactions of these works. A gothic church built in the late fifteenth century, the imposing architecture of the space frames the viewing experience but also inadvertently provides a thematic rhythm to the show. The central area of the church turns into an exploration of the archive through the body, which Mishra considers “a space for the proclamation of propositions.” 

At one end of the nave, towards the apse, Philippe Calia’s The Ajaib Ghar Archive juxtaposes image and drawing, displayed in rotatable double-sided frames, to create an “imaginary museum.” On the other end, Hien Hoang’s Across the Ocean uses fabric and sculpture through forms of collage to physically and metaphorically distort and mock the image of the “good immigrant” within a Western diaspora. Samantha Box’s Caribbean Dreams is a collaged recreation of her African, Indian, Jamaican and Trinidadian ancestry. Box’s images create an archive that seeks to conceal the intrusive gaze upon these colonised bodies and cultures. Riti Sengupta’s Things I can’t say out loud performs various experiences of burden, kinship and aspiration in the domestic sphere, translating intimate conversations with her mother into images. 

In Inheriting and Surrendering the Performance, Ibrahim Ahmed and Lina Geoushy investigate gender through self-portraiture. Ahmed dismantles accepted notions of masculine beauty in Western art history, through seemingly “grotesque” collages, while Geoushy creates a feminist archive that brings to light a liberated yet hidden history of women in Egypt. Vishal Kumaraswamy’s ಮರಣ Marana [Demise] captures the movement of grief through the body as performed during Dalit funeral processions, employing 3D scanning and photogrammetry. All these works create new archives, at the centre of which exists the body, as they bear witness to memory and create possibilities for alternative imaginations. 

Within the more intimate spaces of the grandiose church, works by Nieves Mingueza, Soumya Sankar Bose and Md. Fazla Rabbi Fatiq allow for more delicate reinterpretations of what it means to create an archive. Mingueza’s One in Three Women presents new images created through interventions in archival photographs, drawing attention to the omnipresence of gender-based violence. Through their manipulation, these images demand to be seen as evidence in the context of the impossibility of recording the act of gender-based violence, the absence of accurate statistics and the resultant lack of support from legal systems. Bose’s A Discreet Exit through Darkness attempts to deal with the brief disappearance of his mother and the void in his familial history through the creation of a fictional archive. Stitched together from anecdotes primarily from his grandmother’s memory, the images become the only device to attest to this occurrence. Created during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in Bangladesh, Fatiq's Home endeavours to capture this uncharted experience through images that defy a clear interpretation of space, time or meaning, poetically imagining the perpetual presence of uncertainty. Fume, Root, Seed [Fume, Root, Seed] by Isadora Romero conceptually concludes the exhibition through its visual research on conservation across Latin America, starting from her own family’s history as “seed guardians.”

The diverse nature of the show, both conceptually and materially, ties in with the myriad practices represented from across the Global South, which Mishra considers one of the central aspects of the show. Mediations between the diverse contexts were a constant conversation between the artists and the curator. Mishra highlights a few examples through her curatorial interventions in the artist texts: Ahmed and Geoushy both speak of Egypt’s history of colonisation under France and the text keeps returning to highlight this history as an important framework. A more granular example from Geoushy’s work was the choice to explicate the French roots of the term “belly dancers” alongside the archival images. Traditionally referred to as Raqs Sharqi (or Raks Sharki), the French introduction of the word belly dance shifts focus to the exoticised body instead of the artform, a line that the artist’s text leads with. In Kumaraswamy’s work, the centrality of the caste was an essential framing that the text necessitated, especially within a European context where critical conversations on the subject are nascent. 

Selected through an open call that received about 400 applications, Mishra outlined some of the different approaches to diversity in how the show was curated. Moving beyond traditional definitions or genres of photography provided an interesting opportunity for Mishra to examine contemporary photographic practices. While lens-based practices present an overarching point of entry to bring together diverse artistic methods and forms, it is the disruption of established notions of the photographic—whether the two-dimensional photographic surface or even the sanctity of the printed photograph—that brings the practices of the artists together. Commenting on her approach, Mishra emphasised that the strength of the show is premised not just on regional diversity but on the range across which the practitioners approached the medium. "Perhaps, it is a 'discovery' then of not just new voices, but also of ways in which we view or 're-view' what surrounds us," she added.

Ranging from “young” artists by virtue of age to older practitioners, artists already represented by galleries, as well as those new to photography, the curation complicates a singular definition of a show of “emerging” artists by bringing their varied experiences onto the same platform. Despite being premised on bestowing awards, Mishra highlighted how it prompted a sense of community among the participating artists: "For me, this is the biggest reward of the exhibition, which not only brought diverse practices but also practitioners across the world together to take collective ownership of the exhibition and the ideas it proposed."

The jury, consisting of Clément Chéroux, Hannah Darabi, Devika Singh and Sophie Hackett, declared Isadora Romero the winner of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award 2023, while Soumya Sankar Bose has been given the Public Award.

To learn more about Moving Definitions, read Annalisa Mansukhani’s two-part interview with Soumya Sankar Bose about his work A Discreet Exit through Darkness, Sukanya Deb's interview with Vishal Kumaraswamy about his work ಮರಣ Marana [Demise] and Sukanya Baskar’s interview with Riti Sengupta about her work Things I can’t say out loud.

All artwork installation views from Moving Definitions | An Invitation To Re-View. Images courtesy of Tanvi Mishra and the artists.