Nandan Ghiya

The Chair

The Chair foregrounds media-based tensions between analog and digital imaging technologies as a means of challenging the continued circulation of visual ephemera from India’s colonial past. A mix of found photographs and staged studio portraits deliberately made to look older, The Chair features multiple portraits of figures dressed in period costumes that reference the ornate fashions popular during Great Britain’s imperial rule of India. A hybrid frame wraps around this assemblage, a composite of variously ornate and simple wood finishes culled from disused and forgotten pictures. For each portrait, Ghiya obstructs the subject’s face with hand-painted squares resembling pixels, a gesture of willful obfuscation that renders the colonial subject anonymous while also drawing attention to the subtle but inherent violence of image taking. In using elements from both analog and digital photography, The Chair challenges the imagery and stereotypes of colonial India through contemporary digital technology, blurring the line between the historical and the contemporary, the past and the present. But if Ghiya investigates the issue of individuality in recent colonial past times and its successive iterations in a digital world, he also utilizes his practice as a means to reveal how all representation is effectively manipulated. His hand-painted pixels are more than just gestures towards an historical shift from analog to digital – they are marks of a decisive intervention and a reminder that all images are, in effect, produced by multiple layers of construction, artifice, and variant meaning.