Mapping Obscura: Locating the Space and Non-Space of Memory and Home through the Photograph

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhat does it mean to inhabit? Our many selves find dimensionality through time and in place. This is complicated through the event of mass migration and trauma. One is continuously mapped through a locating of interiority. Within this essay, Nayar traces the birth and evolution of place as interior, and the genesis of her hybrid, constructed photographic process. Through the lens of India’s 1947 Partition, a trajectory of trauma and the ways in which memory functions over time is traced and translated through a family’s resettlement home in New Delhi. Built by her maternal grandfather, a refugee and psychiatrist from East Bengal, this locus in Nayar’s memory sheds light on how one may understand the many intersections of belonging and place. Home is found in habitation, that of desire and the awakening of the Mother. In this way, attachment theory, Winnicott’s transitional object, and the uncanny are touchstones for an internal mapping of psychic space. Through this framework, one understands what it means to embody through time and what is, through the process, left behind.KEYWORDS: Mappingspacememoryhomephotographytransitional objectmothermigrationcamera obscurainhabitlandscapearchitectureNew DelhitimePartitionIndia Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Hill and Wang, 2010), pp. 39–40.2 The Partition of India refers to a historical event in 1947 when the British colony formally dissolved and resulted in the creation of two independent dominions, India and Pakistan. Created along religious Hindi-Muslim lines, the event resulted in large-scale violence, mass deaths and a refugee crisis.3 Photo paper is different from plain paper in that it has a cast coating layer that can receive and imprint an image.4 Camera Lucida, p. 40.5 East Bengal, with its majority Muslim population, became part of the Pakistani state and its name was changed to East Pakistan as a result of Partition. In 1971, after a series of uprisings by Bengali nationalists, East Pakistan became an independent country, Bangladesh, which it is still today.Additional informationNotes on contributorsYamini NayarYamini Nayar lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently an analyst-in-training at the C.G. Jung Institute, New York. Nayar’s work is represented by Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco and Thomas Erben, New York.Nayar has shown her work internationally at venues including the Museum of Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Freud Museum London, Rencontres d’Arles, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Queensland Art Gallery in Australia, DeCordova Museum MA, Kiran Nadar Museum New Delhi, Sharjah Biennial in UAE, Saatchi Gallery UK, and Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India. Public collections include Solomon Guggenheim Museum NY, Kiran Nadar Museum, Saatchi Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, Cincinnati Art Museum, Hiscox and US Arts in Embassies, JP Morgan Chase. Publications include: 20th Century Indian Art, Modern, Post-Independence, Contemporary, editors Partha Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, Rakhee Balaram (Thames and Hudson, 2022); Global Photography: A Critical History, editors Heather Diack, Erina Duganne, Terri Weissman (Routledge, 2020); Chandigarh is in India, edited by Shanay Jhaveri (Shoestring Publishers, 2016); Passages: Indian Art Today (Daab Media, 2014); Lines of Control, Partition as a Productive Space (Green Cardamom, 2012); Unfixed: Postcolonial Photography in Contemporary Art (Jap Sam Books, 2013); Empire Strikes Back: Contemporary Indian Art Today (Saatchi) and Manual for Treason: Sharjah Biennial, edited by Murtaza Vali (2011). Nayar’s work has been featured in The New York Times, New Yorker, Art India, Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Art Papers, and others. Residencies and grants include Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Art Academy of Cincinnati and NYU Visiting Artist Scholar. Nayar has received the Lightborne Fellowship, Aaron Siskind Scholarship, an Art Matters Foundation grant. Nayar holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and BFA from Rhode Island School of Design.Nayar’s work intersects photography, sculpture and varied forms of architecture to interrogate our relationship to the built world and thus, ourselves. In her studio-based practice, the photograph is the remaining object of an invested process of making, building, deconstructing and forming new roads to the built environment. In this way, how we remember is central, hand in hand with how we make meaning.