WOUNDING by Amitesh Grover | Episode #1
As part of the MASH FICA Award 2018 | Supporting New Media Art Practice
FICA hosted at Project_Space the first episode of Amitesh Grover's series of interventions undertaken as part of the MASH FICA Award 2018: Supporting New Media Art Practice, granted to Grover in 2018 for his project, ‘Missing Bodies | Quantified Self.'
In 2018, the MASH FICA Award was given to support independent media artists with the creation of specific projects, engaging with a range of sources both within the arts and the wider field of information technologies, communications and entertainment. As a culmination of this intensive process undertaken with the Award, Amitesh Grover has set up a series of interventions in the form of three episodes that will be enacted at the FICA Reading Room’s Project_Space between August and December 2021.
For Episode #1, titled WOUNDING, Amitesh reproduced photographs from his family archive by breaking the code that visualises them. As part of the process, he took a set of vintage analog photographs from his family's collection, and scanned each image to preserve them.
Each photograph depicts a member of his family who experienced the Partition of India, and the photographs chosen for this episode contain personal stories of the Partition, each an inheritance handed down to him through tellings and re-tellings.
The pixels of an image, when translated into the alphanumeric ASCII code, are a non-intelligible sequence of characters that contain all the information required to hold the image together. Amitesh writes into this ASCII code the stories of his family members, introducing memories into its impersonality, breaking it to produce glitches and cracks in the resulting image. This act of partitioning the code breaks the original photograph, and the resulting image may be read as a conscious act of making the injuries (re)appear in digital form. In the end, what emerges is not a photograph but an image that is itself wounded, carrying the bodies of those partitioned from their land.
While the display has now come to an end at Project_Space, the online iteration of Episode #1: WOUNDING will allow our audiences to revisit the display, the artist's intentionalities as well as our own intervening activations of the same. The website hosts an interview and a walkthrough by Amitesh Grover, and spotlights certain aspects of the display as it unfolded at Project_Space at the FICA Reading Room in Lado Sarai.
To view the virtual afterlife of WOUNDING, click here. It is best viewed on a desktop.
As we move ahead with the afterlives of Episode #1, we look forward to tracing continuities, conversations and parallels towards the realisation of Episode #2.
