In 2012, Canadian photographer Raymonde April arrived in Mumbai for her first visit to India. She was here for a residency organised by the city-based arts management company What About Art?. Her time spent in the city and at her temporary studio at Space 118 off the Harbour Line resulted in a show that was part of Focus Festival 2013. Now, April is back with an open air show as part of this year’s ongoing Focus Festival’s programme at the Carter Road promenade. Titled How Many Seas? the show comprises photographic work by the Afterlife Collective, a group of ten Canadian photographers that April founded.
Beginning at the amphitheatre and continuing up until the dog park, 11 large photographs are installed along the jogging path on the Carter Road promenade. The work draws from images collected by the Afterlife artists from places as diverse as South Korea, Quebec, Romania, Bosnia, Iceland “to form an open constellation that speaks to the ambiguity of memory”, suggests text (in English and Hindi) at the beginning of the exhibition.
Inspired by the sea
“I remember the first time I saw the seaside at Bandra,” says April. “How wide the ocean was, and how many living beings — people, animals, birds — populated its space, and how I could not decide to leave, being captivated by its multiple horizons.” April’s inability to leave Mumbai has resulted in her returning here every December since her first visit. It was, in fact, that first visit that inspired the formation of the Afterlife (or Outre-vie in French) Group.
Upon arriving back in Montreal after almost five months in India, April returned to a project she had proposed before her visit. The project’s concept was to consider the ‘after life’ of images, taking off from the late French Canadian poet Marie Uguay’s work L’Outre Vie ( The Afterlife or Beyond Life ), written during her stay at the Magdalen Islands, and concerning the maritime landscape around her and the people inhabiting it. Describing the afterlife, Uguay writes, “[it] is when one is not yet in life, when one looks at it, when one seeks to enter it. One is not dead but already almost alive, almost born, being born perhaps, in this passage beyond borders and beyond time which defines desire. Desire of the other, desire of the world.”
Photos as memories
Applying Uguay’s thoughts on afterlife to her work as a photographer and media-based artist, April began to consider what happens to the images people make, especially in a world where we consume hundreds of images in a day. Are they relegated to lurking in our subconscious only to ambush us when we’re least expecting, or do some haunt us daily, following us about every day? Is April asking we consider photographs die, and live on Elysium? “It is about the way images can contain time, and memory, but can also be used as objects, and as objects be inserted into other bodies of work. Like, they can be written about or included in films, or used in collages … so they have this afterlife,” says April. So it’s not only about the afterlife inherent to the photograph itself, but there’s also the afterlife an image can have once its original purpose has been served. There is, for instance, Andrea Szilasi’s Fishermen (2015), just towards the end of the Carter Road exhibit. Here, she collages an image of an opera from a 19th century art history book onto a photograph she took of fishermen sitting on their boat. Not only do both images become one surreal object, their combination becomes a prompt for an unwritten story.
When we meet, April recounts bringing together ten colleagues, contemporaries and graduate students to start the research group. Their first meeting over potluck dinner ended up as a ‘show and tell’ of April’s India photographs; their eventual meetings sound more like camps than residencies, where the group lives and works together to understand and explore the many lives of a single or multiple images. It also ends up being a great way to engage with multiple aesthetics and of course, models at the ready when you need them. “Even when I was showing my photos of India at our first potluck dinner, already there was a visceral, emotional connection between what I had done in India and what I was about to do with the group.”
The group, based mostly in Montreal, is connected to the Concordia University where April also teaches. Their work together is more like academic research conducted by artists, suggests April, adding, it’s a group of artists who get together, share their work, share inspiration, and live through experiences together. The group has been on several residencies together, recording all their gatherings into a massive video and audio archive. Different members take up different roles. There’s text, video, and videos about videos, becoming a sort of ouroboros of an image production archive which is continuously researching their own research.
Joining the dots
As a group, Afterlife has exhibited twice before, and How Many Seas? is their third exhibition, and it is all about stories. Other than April, it features work by photographers Jessica Auer, Jacques Bellavance, Velibor Božović, Gwynne Fulton, Katie Jung, Chih-Chien Wang, Jinyoung Kim, Lise Latreille, Celia Perrin Sidarous, Marie-Christine Simard, Bogdan Stoica and Andrea Szilasi. The images, as their makers, are from all over the world and not confined to a style or aesthetic. Each image comes with some (awkwardly placed given how painful it was to read them) captions on the side of each photograph — a fragment of its makers’ thoughts, feelings, hopes or dreams. It’s an invitation to join the dots to make your own story, or find yourself in one. Images like Chih-Chien Wang’s ‘Thread on Water’ or Cecilia Perrin Sidarous’ ‘Vibration’ are their own sense of meditative, almost attempting to merge into the water behind. Viewers, especially some for whom Carter Road is an oasis in the noise and rush of Mumbai, may find empathy for Bogdan Stoica’s ‘Contemporary Slave’, or familiar layouts in Jinyoung Kim’s ‘Objects on the Rooftop, Unfold’, photographed in Kim’s native town in South Korea which she hadn’t visited since childhood.
By itself, the exhibition pulls on an interesting thread, and one wishes there were more images for a viewer to draw deeper conclusion from. However, when placed on Carter Road, where to view it you need to become a nuisance to the joggers who use the path, with your neck tilted uncomfortably to read accompanying text, it falls a little short. Not just because it becomes physically challenging to relate to the exhibition, but because we have an art education problem here that contemporary art fails to address: as a public, we’re not used to art making sense to us. We’re not used to art at all. It’s something that calls for a constant dialogue between art and the city. Perhaps a way to make sure the next exhibit at Carter Road makes sense to everyone and not just art reviewers, those in charge might want to consider holding on to those frames, replacing the art they hold regularly so we won’t end up overhearing a jogger gasp in shock at realising they jogged past art without noticing it.
How Many Seas? is on display at the Carter Road promenade, Bandra (West), until the end of Focus Photography Festival 2017 on March 23.
