ZA :

Coming to your curatorial projects, whether it’s with Archives of Public Protest, Turbine Bagh, or Collaboration > Control there is a bringing together of artists that seems to bind your ideas together. There is often talk about photography being a solitary pursuit, and I was wondering how you move past that through your curatorial expressions and exhibitions.

VH :

I think my interest in exhibitions stems from this idea that there is a physicality to it. Anselm Franke, who used to curate at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, proposed the idea of “the essay exhibition,” which I've always found quite appealing as someone who also writes essays. You are taking people through a journey where there is a sense of narrative and flow. Rather than guiding them through words or paragraphs, you’re moving them through a room and a space while communicating something quite deeply. Regarding the collaborative nature of my curations, I’ve always veered towards a sense of community. The projects I curated with Iona Fergusson for example, were always rewarding because you have this additional set of conversations that flow into thinking about how concepts make sense, or what it is that you're trying to communicate from a body of work. I think it’s especially challenging because the works that I deal with are often political and require a certain kind of contextualization. Take Rohit Saha’s exhibition 1528 at Peckham 24, in London, 2022 for example. He writes that “It often happens... people are picked upon mere suspicion, taken to army camps, stripped, tortured and then they suddenly vanish. Only a lucky few are ever spared. It has been claimed by official sources such as the Extra-Judicial Execution Victims’ Families Association of Manipur (EEVFAM) that there are well over 1528 incidents of logged case files concerning extra-judicial killings carried out by the Armed Forces between 1979-2012 in Manipur, India.” The thought is that how do you introduce such heavy, and also specific contexts, so that audiences can begin to understand them, but without the explanatory aspect overriding the work itself? And doing so in a way that encourages people to make a certain effort to engage? It’s a difficult balance to strike because putting things out there while not completely breaking them down can also be a bit alienating to audiences, particularly when we consider diverse accessibility requirements. Basically, that tricky balance of giving context and information without overexplaining or determining fixed meanings I suppose.

ZA :

In the group exhibition titled Collaboration > Control which also won the FORMAT21 Award, you write that the multimedia works by Anna Ehrenstein, Nida Mehboob, Ashfika Rahman and the #turbinebagh solidarity movement, seek to inspire dialogue on artistic control and co-creation, using images “made with” collaborators rather than “taken of” subjects. This is another area of power dynamics that’s heavily central to photography, and also one that touches upon this idea of “collaboration.”

VH :

Yes, and all four of the artists in that exhibition present carefully, collaboratively produced bodies of work that challenge dominant structures of power. But looking back now, I think when I wrote that line, I was also being quite aspirational in some senses about this relationship between photography and its collaborative potential. I say that now because I recently did an in-conversation piece with Christopher Pinney, who is one of my PhD supervisors, for a photographic journal called Membrana. They had an issue on the theme of collaboration, guest edited by Anthony Luvera. And I remember when Anthony asked me to do this piece and I began talking to people, a lot of their first responses were- “I’d love to know what collaboration actually means!” In some way, it seems these days that everything is “collaborative”, either on a political, ethical, or technical level. Or just in a trendy, buzz-word kind of way. Tanzim Wahab had once sent me a text by Tenzing Sonam & Ritu Sarin from one of their exhibitions where they talk about collaboration in the context of helping the enemy - collaborators during the conflict. I don't quite know what to do with that, but I remember it kind of stuck with me, and gave me a new perspective on the word which is more often seen in a positive light. In the conversation with Chris for Membrana, he talks quite a bit about the inherently collaborative nature of the photographic event, in the sense that it requires the participation of multiple actors - though that in itself doesn’t necessarily mean that the power relations involved aren’t unequal or problematic.

ZA :

That’s interesting because as someone who is part of a photo-collective myself, this way of working together brings in a safety net in an otherwise competitive landscape…

VH :

Absolutely, and in that context, it’s a concept I’ve become quite interested in because it’s something that I notice quite strongly in India and the UK too. The need for having these collaborative spaces where people are in conversation, where it isn’t public-public, but again within a certain kind of public- you aren’t by yourself. The collective exists as a semi-public space where things can begin to go out into the world, and there is a safety around them.

ZA :

I also found your curation of the exhibition, Prepress, at the London Design Festival, 2022, intriguing because it opened the space for artists, publishers and bookmakers to unravel their processes to public view. The exhibition itself was treated like a work-in-progress and gave insight into the making and deconstructing of a photobook so-to-speak. Could you touch upon some ideas that you found interesting from that experience?

VH :

That show was a super-fun collaboration with Johnny McMullan, who runs the ZONE6 photobook imprint here in London. Through this, we were hoping that bookmaking as a form could be opened in its various stages and give the artists a chance to test things out, while people respond to their experimentations. We were thinking about how the exhibition doesn’t have to be the endpoint. Because that’s often what happens while making work right? There are various iterations that exist within the work, like with dummy books for example. Except here, we wanted to play with this idea of the exhibition also being a testing ground with audience resonance and feedback in a shorter period of time. And a lot of the projects also showcased what it looks and feels like to try and make sense of how images fit together.

ZA :

Lastly, since you work so closely with piecing together photographs, do you also photograph for yourself?

VH :

I’ve realised that I only mainly take pictures if I’m in a new place. I’m back to being a holiday photographer in some ways. Yes, I take pictures as part of my research, but that’s more of a straightforward documentation of a scene. Having been around archives and photographs, I realised that I don’t particularly feel a need to say something through making photographs myself, which of course is the opposite from the people who make really good work through the visual medium. To me, images are put together to elaborate a set of questions or interests that take place when they are in conversation with one another. And I think, there's certain parallels with research and writing too that allow me to bring different sources together to try and make sense of something that you're thinking about yourself. As part of my current PhD research, I have been working with a set of images by the iconic Bangladeshi photojournalist Rashid Talukder who was most known for capturing some of the defining images of the genocide during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. But after the July 2024 revolution in the country, many of these images now operate very differently. I think it’s unsettling, but at the same time exciting since the conversation has changed rather radically, and so has my relationship with the material. Now, to do a show framed around 1971 would mean to ask a very different set of questions and involves the decentring of certain key political figures who feature heavily in a lot of the images. Everything is now being reconsidered, which for me is one of the most exciting aspects of photography.