Origin Myth

Origin Myth (2021) is a photographic installation that was exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Photography and Horsham Regional Gallery, Victoria in the exhibition, To Resound, Unbound in 2021 and curated by Jack Willet. It features a 3 metre long, folded photographic concertina print that drapes over three waxed-steel cubes and is accompanied by four pigment prints pinned to the wall.

The prints in this installation are drawn from the artist’s familial archive in India between 1930 and 1960. The work makes connections between two generations of family members, such as diary entries, English lessons, bodily poses performed for the camera, trips to the zoo. There are recurring images in the work: a bodybuilder flexes his arm muscles, but his head is obscured by another image: a man standing in front of the ruins of a building wearing a uniform worn by a British soldier. In another image: the veneer of a cinema after an earthquake holds up a poster of a film bearing the title ‘Blood Money’. Images such as these recur throughout the work, folded in a concertina, like pages in an open book. The images re-imagine the sequence of photographs taken by the artist’s late grandfather. The images are eclectic but centre around an earthquake (echoed in the folds themselves), bodybuilding, elephants in zoos and scenes from India. Using strategies of repetition and sequencing, the narrative of these photographs shifts and changes from historical to metaphorical based on their proximity to other images, shifting and changing under folds of paper.