“Memory’s Images”: A Catalogue of the Self by Mitul Kajaria

Drawing on the photograph as an archival object of memory, Most happenings are beyond expression is a processual work by Mitul Kajaria that explores the conceptualisation and presentation of an archive of the self. Produced as part of the Khoj Support Network mentorship program in 2020–21, the work was displayed at the Work in Process viewing at Khoj Studios from 20 March to 20 April 2021, where it brought together a fragment of Kajaria's personal archive of photographs, taken over a decade of image-making. These were cross-referenced with his daily journals to create a diagramming of spaces, associations, emotions and journeys collected over the years. 

A photo-artist, curator and former architect, Kajaria’s oeuvre can be read as an attempt to record the poetics of space through the medium of photography. This is particularly foregrounded in his body of work on heritage structures in Ahmedabad as well as in Dehari, a collaborative installation with Piyush Pandya that merged the potencies of language, literature and photography as part of a display for Abhivyakti: The City Arts Project in 2018. A closer look at Kajaria’s work reveals a sensitive, affective approach to storytelling around ideas of home and belonging—themes that recur across and intersect with his other explorations of memory and its deceptiveness.

Presented as a culmination of many acts of collecting and archiving the self, Most happenings are beyond expression plays with the idea of surfaces. At Khoj, the installation was presented as small monochrome photographic prints zigzagging across a wall, punctuated with handwritten text on the surface of the wall. Collated into what Kajaria referred to as a "visual journal," the archive of images—interspersed with equally emotive writing—conjured an imagined and/or real other to whom these texts are possibly addressed. The images themselves comprised intimate portraits, stills of conversation, blurred cityscapes and the sea, graffitied walls, found objects, silhouettes and shadows. Kajaria chose to exhibit these images as black-and-white photographs in order to preserve a sense of visual cohesion when viewing the work as a whole. This further spotlighted the material surface of the photographic and its inscriptive potential, especially as the archive manages to assimilate multiple genealogies of the self.

The work converges the diaristic with the photograph, focusing on intimacies that underlie the making of both memory and image. In a conversation over Zoom, Kajaria explained his relationship with the retrospective and how it allowed him to conceive of the larger expanse of the archive as something that was evolving rather than stagnant. Each photograph he makes may or may not be imbued with immediate value, and often the images simply enclose a moment for posterity. As a photographer and archivist, Kajaria leans more toward the interplay of subjectivity. The liberty of hindsight lets him look anew at the contexts, memories and meanings accrued over time in his photographs. Thus, Most happenings are beyond expression stitches the mundane through a lens of vulnerability and self-reflection.

Kajaria envisions his archive of images as offering multiple permutations and combinations for consumption, allowing for several versions of the work to coexist. For him, deciding the eventual form of the work is dependent on the space, the expected audience and the duration of the display. His process accommodates an innate archival instinct and a curatorial rationale that is introspective. As a viewer, one finds a version of the artist preserved across metaphors of space that are activated through his photographs. Most happenings are beyond expression is a work that contemplates the intertwining of memory with multiple imaginations of the self. It refuses a fixity of genre and category, complicating the ways in which we think about the images we make and those that we leave behind. Tracing the momentary, the momentous and the inarticulable; Kajaria’s archive balances the illegibility of nostalgia with a measured desire to grasp the residual.

All works by Mitul Kajaria. Images courtesy of the artist.