Ways of Unseeing brings together artworks that refer in various ways to the inadequacies of visual representation. The participating artists all work with different ways of evoking the invisible through the adoption of absence as an artistic strategy. Rather than suggesting that one way of depicting the world is superior to another, they emphasise the fact that each method of representation offers its own specific opportunities and limitations.
The title of the exhibition is a reference to art critic John Berger’s (1926–2017) popular and ground-breaking 1972 TV series Ways of Seeing and the eponymous companion book. Berger wanted to make the contents of traditional painting accessible, and dispel the public’s sense that they were clouded in obscurity. He set out to challenge the notion that understanding an artwork requires specialised knowledge of art history. His demystification of visual codes was only made more effective by the way he connected historical subjects to aspects of popular culture and the visual idiom of the commercial world.
Alongside Berger’s TV series and ideas, the films and video installations of author and filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944–2014) play a central role in this exhibition. Several of these works were compiled from existing materials: photographs, film footage, and digital animations that were already, circulating in the world, but which weren’t intended for viewing so much as for other purposes. In order to analyse these kinds of pictures, which were sourced, amongst others, from military, industrial, and surveillance-related contexts, Farocki claims that we need to gain insight into the ways they are circulated and used in complex networks. Besides humans, these networks are populated by machines and computers.
Berger, like Farocki, rooted his theoretical and artistic projects within a culture in which photography and film were both afforded an exalted status as the ultimate records of truth. These thinkers both acknowledged the true complexities of the relationship between knowing and seeing. Ways of Unseeing highlights the ways that Berger and Farocki – and all the other participating artists – help us attain a richer, more complex understanding of visual materials and the influence that they wield.
Re-Presented From The Traces, 2022-2023
Terracotta | Variable
Birender Kumar Yadav, Re–presented from the Traces, terracotta sculptures, 2022–23. Re-Presented from Traces takes its point of departure in the brick kilns of Mirzapur, which Birender Yadav began visiting in 2014. About sixty per cent of the workers there are migrant seasonal worker (from lower caste and lower-class backgrounds) who come from the adjacent regions of Bihar and Jharkhand.The working season lasts from November to June, after which they all go back to their homes. Because of these frequent relocations, their children are unable to attend school and learn to read. The families are hired as units, and made to work sixteen-hour days. Many of them suffer from respiratory conditions or malnutrition. At the end of each season, the temporary housing the workers have lived in is destroyed.
To make Re-presenting from the Traces, Yadav gathered some of the items that are left behind when the temporary dwellings are torn down. He then proceeded to make casts from these objects, and produce terracotta sculptures in the same factories. One of the works, which resembles a set of scales, is a reference to a common saying among the workers, which states that you can’t balance the bricks properly until you’ve broken a rib. Most of the workers at the kilns have broken one or more ribs in the course of their heavy labour.
For several years, in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, and installations, Yadav has explored the conditions of brick manufacturing workers in the region of Uttar Pradesh. In Re-presented from Traces, he used small gestures and common objects to
