अहम्
archival
the image serves as a condensed affective object that mediates unconsciously, bypassing mental repression by presenting a direct visual trace, directly stimulating an intense, involuntary response that unlocks a personal, often repressed, memory and association, making the photograph a unique catalyst for abstracting the unconscious.
retrieval
OF AN UNCONSCIOUS ABSTRACTION
TATTV
ASTITV
VYAKTITV
SATTV
[Background]
a reality
The relationship between unconscious memories and symbolism is foundational to psychoanalytic theory. Rather than being a simple, direct link, this connection is a dynamic process of compromise, disguise, and representation. Symbolism is the result of negotiation uses to articulate repressed, inaccessible memories and desires without triggering the psychic censor. Symbolism is, therefore, the essential mechanism by which the unconscious content (repressed memory) is translated into the manifest form (the visible symbol).
When applied to the conflicted terrains of postcolonial identity and the rise of nationalism, this photographic process seeks to reveal the structural trauma inherent in a fragmented collective consciousness. The repetition of visual motifs, the deliberate framing of voids, and the insistence on certain textures or lights are intended to abstract the hidden cost of identity formation - the primal repressions and the affective residue of historical violence that fuel contemporary social tensions. The resulting image is a visible symptom, insisting on the unseen truth beneath the ideological surface.
Drawing on the Freudian understanding that unconscious memories are rendered palatable through dream-work (condensation and displacement), and the Lacanian assertion that the unconscious is “structured like a language” I locate memory within the Symbolic Order. The photograph becomes the cipher for the memory. It functions as a Metaphor (condensation), collapsing a vast temporal and emotional sequence into a singular, fixed frame. Crucially, it stands as a perpetual Signifier of Lack, insisting upon the lost object - a moment, a history, or an identity that is irrevocably past. The final image does not show the memory; but the effect of its repression.
Ultimately, this work seeks to challenge the notion of the photograph as a window onto reality. Instead, it positions the photograph as a new reality altogether: a stabilised, material manifestation of the unconscious truth. By visually externalising the mechanisms of displacement and condensation, I invite the viewer to analyse the symbol as an encrypted map back to the collective lack that defines our present moment. The resulting body of works are a meditation on what remains when history is structurally repressed.
[Ground (A)]
in existence
the conditions that shape individual interactions and interconnections, representing the combined effects of class location, the commodity structure of late capitalism, and class consciousness influenced by common ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge define within a group, organisation, or society, forming a class collectively, especially through language, existence social structures
[Ground (B)]
in essence
the conditions that shape individual interactions and interconnections, influenced by common ideas, beliefs, attitudes, abstracting the essence by decontextualising the subject from its surroundings and knowledge shared within a group, organisation, or society, forming a class collectively, especially through language, media, and social structures, that define the individual experience.
[Foreground]
and its subjectivity
the production and reproduction of subjectivities, intertwined in the technologies of representation, with their effects and affects, their intent and meaning, as perceptible objects.
The photographer acts as the "Operator" (in Barthes's terms), making conscious choices about composition, framing, focus, and subject matter. This intentionality reflects their conscious ego—their social, ethical, and artistic goals.
An inquiry into the structural unconscious, where the image serves not as a record of presence, but as an index of absence. Operating on the premise that memory—be it personal or collective—is never articulated directly, but always through symbols and metonymy, the aim is to make visible the resulting abstraction of repressed memory, using the photographic image as the ultimate, material signifier.
You can think about the medium in almost purely technological terms: to take a photograph is to exercise a number of options - plane of focus, shutter speed, aperture, framing, angle and so on - and the 'content' of the work becomes your choice from amongst these options and the way you structure them. This is an attitude which comes out of Greenbergian Modernism. Or, you can start from the fact that photography was invented to give an illusionistic rendering of some aspect of the world in front of the camera - which leads into considerations of representation and narrative.
Victor Burgin