We are described into corners, and then we have to describe our way out of corners.—Salman Rushdie, in an interview with W. L. Webb
In April 2019, as the general elections in India dominated the media, an international team of astronomers published the first photograph of a black hole, silhouetted against a disc of glowing gas surrounding this cosmic void, the threshold beyond which not even light can escape. The image showed us what we thought could never be seen, almost two centuries after the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura to take the world’s first photograph, looking out from his second-story workroom. These acts of imaging have generated a radical, fundamental warping of the space-time of human consciousness and triggered a cultural “event horizon,” by mapping the existential coordinates of memory, genealogy, ecology, aesthetics, history, and geography.
The “aura” of images proliferates beyond time and space, exemplified in this issue by works from both within and outside Delhi, and by various eras, cultures, and media. My mandate as guest editor was to build on previous city-centric issues of , but as a curator managing a collection, visiting personal repositories, and researching in state and private archives, I am aware that image making is always in the process of expansion and reflection, regardless of frame, paradigm, and aesthetic scaffolding. Through continued engagement with ’s editorial team and independent artists, and while considering the possibility of addressing new audiences, we have tried to offer visual convergences, juxtapositions, and inversions, hoping to explore the forever growing parameters of place and to suggest the migratory, the mutable, the transient.
