The exhibition takes as its starting point the role of photography in re-imagining the world over the last two centuries of colonialism and global capitalism; in particular, the intimate linkage of the histories of mapping and photography in South-East Asia. Both were simultaneously methods of knowledge production and representation, and both were promoted by colonial powers as they sought to violently exert their authority over the region. Almost as soon as photography was invented, it was sent to the frontiers of the Empire, where the camera’s professed ability to “capture” the landscape became an essential part of colonialism’s appropriative logic and surveilling capacity. As anthropologist Benedict Anderson has written in his seminal “Census, Map, Museum”, this thinking was characterized by a “totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state's real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the grid was always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there. It was bounded, determinate, and therefore –in principle – countable.“ In other words, photography and mapping were technologies of the same totalizing gaze, at one at the same time representing and creating its subjects, projecting and modeling Empire as a classifiable hierarchical space of threat and speculation. Indeed, according to historian James Poskett, the eight-volume atlas titled The People of India, which was published between 1868-75 and contained over 400 ethnographic photographs of “local tribes and castes” and was one of the first large-scale local photographic projects, became “an exercise of imperial surveillance” after the rebellion of 1857. Organized by the Political and Secret Department, its photographs became a means of documenting and classifying the purported loyalty of subjects as classified into “tribes” and castes. The Photographic Society of Madras, one of the first such institutions in the world, was founded in 1857.

Maps of Disquiet harks back to this twinned history of photography and mapping, and by doing so, it confronts the paradigms of post-colonial nation building and identity formation, and subsequent fissures that emerge, especially in India, with economic liberalization and the rise of communal politics, while also looking at current uses of photography, both at the service of power, surveillance, and extraction, and as a tool in countering these forces. Based on this conceptual framework, Maps of Disquiet offers a platform to critical mapping practices—a mapping from below, in flux; mapping as an insoluble question, as an unlearning—as well as to photographic grammars that reflect on this history, providing counter-maps and charting alternative futures.

Maps of Disquiet operates as six interwoven and shifting layers of enquiry that explore the representation of labour, urban imaginaries, the commons, flows, archeology and mining, and what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, describing growing hostility towards minorities across the world, refers to as a ‘fear of small numbers’. The artistic projects function within more than one of these layers as they explore ways of comprehending and articulating today’s disquietude.

Mining and archeology – in conjunction with mapping purposes and practices – crystallized during the 19th century with colonial expansion. But whereas the latter concerned themselves with the earth’s visible surface in its present state, the former addressed the past and the subterranean. Mining remains in the frontier of capitalist expansion through the extraction of so-called “natural resources''. And to this day, archeology is a contentious arena within which photography has a central function as an instrument of research, documentation, knowledge production, and politics. In both, competing national narratives, developmental agendas and ideologies are often played out in highly visible and mediated forms. The archeological digs in Keeladi in the heart of Tamilnadu, which have received much attention in local and social media, are reflected through two artistic projects commissioned for the biennale, within which they serve as starting points for a wider consideration of the politics of archeological representation, including the making of what historian Romila Thapar calls the “contemporary past”.

In contrast to this heightened visibility stands the precarity and vulnerability of Labour, made nearly invisible under global capitalism. With its deep entanglement with gender, caste, migration, ecological and social injustice, and, of course, identity, labour and labour rights today stand on the precipice. The pandemic and the lockdowns it brought about have further highlighted the systemic inequities that are at the heart of the current global division of labour. In its attempt to offer a tentative resistant cartography, the exhibition looks at Flows and their discontents – economic, migratory, ecological, flows both of humans and of objects – which are often left unaccounted for in static representations. The tension between the (often violent) protection afforded under neoliberalism to the free-flow of commodities and capital, and the (often violent) restrictions enacted on the movement of people, has only been further exacerbated during the pandemic. While the integrity of global supply chains has come under intense focus, migrant workers and day-labourers have seen their rights further violated.

In close conjunction with the arguments under Labour and Flows are the social and economic conditions that are sustaining the climate of suspicion and violence against minorities across the world. It is the history of the same totalizing colonial project – and its divide and conquer logic – that foments what Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has described as an “anxiety of incompleteness” whereby numerical majorities confronting an increasingly globalized world “become predatory and ethnocidal with regard to small numbers precisely when some minorities (and their small numbers) remind these majorities of the small gap that lies between their condition as majorities and the horizon of an unsullied national whole”. Although published over a decade ago, Appadurai’s observations sadly read as more pertinent than ever in light of the recent wave of anti-Muslim riots and racist legislation in India, and increased ethnic and majoritarian violence across the globe.

In recent years, the Tamil term Poramboke – traditionally referring to land that cannot be bought or sold and is reserved for communal use, but nowadays associated with neglect, and widely used as a derogatory term – has become something of a rallying cry for a new generation of activists working around questions concerning the encroachment, privatization and ecological degradation of common grounds. Literally “unaccountable” or unassessed – from the Tamil Puram, outside, and pokku, the book of accounts – the pejoritization of Poramboke, as Chennai-based activist Nityanand Jayaraman has noted, can be traced back to the British Raj, for whom land that couldn’t be monetized or taxed was seen as waste. It is within this context that the exhibition wishes to highlight the question of – and the struggle for – the Commons.

Urban Imaginaries takes some of the same questions further, bringing the focus back to the city and the modern urban-scape (the preferred site of biennales globally), by contesting its framing as a singular spatial, social, linguistic, or geographical entity. By recognizing its multiple – often opposing – histories, shifting nuclei, fluid peripheries and inherent porosity, it urges us to think about forms of viewing, knowledge and heritage that are reproduced and layered in the making of a city. This allows us to consider, as Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender have suggested in their writing, “the imagination as constitutive of social reality in general and of urban space in particular”. If we read, departing from here, the city as a palimpsest of imaginaries, questioning the urban reality is always a confrontation with former ideas of organizing the urban sphere. This is particularly relevant in postcolonial contexts, where the continuing impact of colonial planning with its definitive territorial boundaries and routes set to economic and social values, is today encountering huge formal and informal development in infrastructure to accommodate the growing influx of people and commodities.

In his “On the Exactitude of Science” Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges has provided perhaps the most salient image for the absurdist fallacy at the heart of the totalizing and homogenizing ambitions of imperial map-making: “the Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it”. The fate of that map, Borges tells us, was to end up as “tattered ruins”, left to the dry desert – the sole relic of the discipline of geography. With rising sea levels, heating climates, growing inequity, and the current global pandemic as its ominous backdrop, Maps of Disquiet wishes to avoid any presumption of totality or exactitude – lest its fate be similar to that of Borges’ tattered map. Rather, the Biennale offers an open-ended draft, not a gridded order capturing territory, but a loosely woven plurality of narratives, histories, and future visions of troubles and resistance.