Twenty-one large B&W photographs hang from near-invisible strings, precarious; the visitor hesitates at the threshold, stopped by the soft illumination of a video projected on to the ground. The eye moves up from the video to the photographs, returns, only to move up again. The photographs rise in staggered uneven planes, inviting both the gaze and the body to travel across the space. At first sight, the hanging seems to form a composite image floating in space; but as one draws close, this impression disaggregates into multiplicity, each image carrying its own particular charge. Moving between them is to experience a powerful intimacy with individual women, specific moments of political urgency, particular histories. 

Documentary images are interleaved with staged collaborative portraits, but do not follow a chronological order. Similarly, several manifestations of the same woman appear at different nodes of the constellation, building a viewing path reminiscent of the way memories surface. The video projection – allusive, atmospheric – uses densely layered images and texts to comment on, collide or syncopate with the photographs in non-linear, unpredictable ways, producing an annotation unique to each viewer.

Blurring the boundaries between personal memoir and historical event, Record/Resist presents an intimate reflection on my engagement with the women’s movement in India as both photographer and activist. I revisit my archive of documentary images made over twenty years, from 1980 to the early 2000s, to investigate the meanings, slippages and contradictions within collective resistance, and to explore the construction of subjectivities through social and political processes. Refiguring our relationship with histories of resistance, the installation presents embodied documents that enact the mutual enfolding between subject, photographer, viewer and artwork.