Performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider has written about the photograph as a gesture that reaches in two directions at once: it pivots backwards in time, in reference to the event it documents; it stretches forward in time, to a speculative viewer. It both answers a call from the past and elicits a response from the future; it is a chorus of voices. In spending time with the complex, poetic, and deeply felt lens-based practices of Identity, Connection, Place, I’m slowly becoming attuned to the textures of these cross-temporal conversations, how they reverberate across the surfaces of photographs, particularly those that have been cut, collaged, or otherwise manipulated by their artists. 

Nilupa Yasmin’s তেরা Tera - a Star (2021) is an ornate textile woven from archival images of the artist’s grandmother, produced as a physical manifestation of grief in the wake of her passing. Sixty-six years of life have been cut and reassembled by Yasmin; a complex portrait of Tera emerges as small recognizable details (an eyebrow, a patterned saree, a grasping finger) are interwoven into an abstracted whole that communicates the warmth, affection, and intergenerational knowledge within a British-Bangladeshi family. In Gina Lundy’s works—particularly Domestic Portfolio from 2017 and Head, Hands, Heart (Homo Ludens) from 2022—the artist collaborates with their children to create playful and scattered vignettes of home life: they document their children’s unique interventions with household items in the former series (and clean them up), and in the latter a black-and-white photograph of a hand grasping a twig is partially obscured by colourful smears and scribbles of paint, syncopations of more child-sized palms and fingers pressing on the image’s surface.