An Inconvenience of Knowledge and Reconciliation is a collaborative reflective piece that was published in the 8th issue of Hakara Journal. It is an attempt to build a geography of readings and responses. It toys with the stimulative tendencies of black and white, and the absorptive capacities of acts of reading and responding to. Aligning two bodies of work and two processes, it also seeks to magnify the ways in which meaning-making complicates any triangulation of memory, association, affect, and imagination.

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The submission comprised of photographs from a series taken by Annalisa Mansukhani between 2016 and 2019 across Delhi and Rajgir. Titled Familiarity, these images depict a layered parlaying – a mnemonic conversation initiated with familiar and unfamiliar landscapes in the two cities.

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The untitled sequence of responses to these pairings forms the second body of work

by myself. Keeping in mind Familiarity’s own ravelings within the ambit of memory and retrospection, my responses are graphic (re)visualisations envisaged while reading the photographs.

 

"A photograph is a fallible record of a very specific encounter with a landscape.

This fallibility is not tied to its material existence; instead it is evoked in the multiple interpretative possibilities that reside within it. Our preoccupation with photographs has always been mutual, and in thinking about photography, our conversations would often focus on what black and white photographs make possible – both for the photographer and the viewer. Drawn to bodies of photographic work that dwell on the dynamic of black and white, we realised that viewing a photograph can be thought of as an act that establishes a primordial ‘inconvenience’ – a sense of unease that sets in, a feeling of never being able to articulate the differences between what is seen, what is known, and what is felt. We began to concentrate on the specificity of such a feeling and the ways in which it could play out with regard to black and white photographs.

Along with this, a compelling aspect of this ‘inconvenience’ that came to light was the instability that characterizes our responses to a photograph – prior associations and tangents affect an encounter with a photograph, allowing a Barthesian non-singularity of reaction."

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To read the full submission, please follow this link.