ALL THAT WE SAW
Photo Installation (2022)“Grover’s All That We Saw is a timely meditation on the nature of photographs.” - Chennai Photo Biennale
“Grover brings in images that have shaped his memory through pivotal historical and social events.” - News9Live
“A future-fable written by Grover explores the concept of remembrance.” - Daiji World News
“This series of image-less photographs is an act of resistance” - The Hans India
“Grover employs the vantage point of personal memories to create this series” - STIR World
All That We Saw is a series of image-less photographs drawn entirely from the artist's imagination and memory. This work seeks to invoke the largeness and the quietness of a photograph by focusing on the ways in which we remember them. A photograph has a secure foothold in its focus, but over time, the power of its abstraction takes root in our memory, and engenders a memory of its own. This work seeks to extend the photograph beyond its visible level, its popular effect, into the recesses of our collective and individual minds to inquire how photos take root. It also attempts to explore how language is intimately connected with the cultural codes through which we understand images, and ways in which visual culture structures our perception. Grover forgoes any kind of photographic material in his work, relying instead on personal recollection. He is interested in how memory and forgetting shape our perception of the past; he uses the title THAT IMAGE to point, with immediacy, towards the lost, the old, the popular, the personal, the distorted, the blurred photograph in order to illustrate the dynamic relationship between memory and the photograph.
(This series was originally commissioned for the third edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale)
Grover also wrote a short piece of fiction inspired by this series, which is published in ASAP Art - Alternative South Asia Photography Art, available here
As a special commission for the third edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale, the artist will reveal a new image-less photograph —one for every day of the biennale— on the biennale website. This work is an extension of the artist’s long running immensely popular series Velocity Pieces, in which he has been producing board-poems for a public billboard installed in central Delhi since 2019. With this new series — All That We Saw — the viewer is imagined as a witness of images, a mental archivist, a contemplative node in the memory of a collective, and as a participant in the act of restoring the image.
Typography: Sijya Gupta | Language: Hindustani | Commission: Chennai Photo Biennale, Edition III | Created by Amitesh Grover
