Archives in Transit: From Analogue to Digital Registers

The archive points to a longing for sources, stories and the uncovering of connections. Its formulation has always been framed by choices, exclusions and other human interventions. Through his project, this archive has no legs, Srinivas Kuruganti resurrected a personal archive of photographs taken in New York in the 1990s. This archive consisted of images of friends and scenes taken during the artist’s long residence in the city—a period marked by an active nightlife, mass protests, concerts and the like. For a long time, he travelled with ten trunks of archived material in the form of negatives, contact sheets and prints from one city to another. Owing to the enormous volume of the work and intimacy with the content, Kuruganti took a long time to come to the point of scanning, digitising and cataloguing his photographs with their respective numerical location for quick access. This process was ultimately realised within the framework of Five Million Incidents (2019–20), conceived by Goethe Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective. As part of the said project, the artist set up a work station on the institutional premises and began this mammoth task. He invited friends, acquaintances and strangers to make edits to the sequence of the print photographs on an “edit wall,” while recording each iteration. Interesting juxtapositions emerged from the observations, as images changed context with the transfer of agency.

In this continuing conversation with Kuruganti, the artist discusses how, as a spectator to his own past, he arranged these observations into photobooks at the end of each day of the five-day experiment. For this, he used the multiple narratives offered by the removed perspectives of strangers. The viewer thus emerged as an active participant, offering an external lens to a vast body of personal portraiture. Every day, the edits would change as one worked on the previous person’s interpretations, leaving a palimpsest of inputs on the wall. This created a new methodology of seeing, allowing the photographer himself to look at diegetic patterns that were now foregrounded through choices made by other hands. The project allowed Kuruganti to digitally catalogue a vast and dormant body of work while mobilising it through the impulses of viewing bodies.

_{(Featured Image: Untitled. Srinivas Kuruganti. East Village, New York, 1993. Image courtesy of the artist.)}

Interview taken on April 20, 2021.