Installation by Jogendro Singh Kshetrimayum.
There are 387 photo images all together, 273 of which were generated by the image search of “Manipur” on Google (generated during the months of April and May 2014). The remaining 114 images are from my field visits to Manipur in 2009, 2011 and 2013. The photos are all in 4X6 prints. The images from the ethnographic fieldwork are merged, without any distinct boundary, with the images generated by Google search engine. The area enclosed by the seven vitrines is a reflection of the ‘work space’ where I struggle to write about Manipur. There are papers, articles, drafts, corrections and rejections. The copies of The Sangai Express, locally published in English and Manipuri, were collected during the field visits. The piles of American Ethnologist and American Anthropologist, stacked up or spread out, are indices of the production of ‘anthropological knowledge’ and its uneven distribution. In one of the shelves of the first vitrine to the left, there is a receipt of the books on Manipur that I checked out from the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL). PCL has more than 300 books and documents on Manipur in its collection. Some of them are hard to find in the libraries of Manipur.
The reflections on the glass panels create some interesting effects for the images – some of which were happy accidents and some deliberate. The exhibition is part of the final project in Craig Campbell’s Intermedia and Aesthetics (Spring 2014).
Jogendro Singh Kshetrimayum
Graduate Student Department of Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin
jogendro@gmail.com
Venue: Next to SAC 4.114 – 4.120
Time: Spring 2014 – Summer 2014