‘Spectatorship & Scenography in The Archives’ is a selection of interlinked materials from the Alkazi Theatre Archives and the Alkazi Collection of Photography. The exhibition uses the frameworks of theatre and photography specifically dealing with landscape, its people, and subaltern histories to reconsider the historical intangibility of spectatorship as an active agent in re-narrativizing historical memories of a landscape and its people. What remains in the spectrum of perception in both photography and performance is the intangible participation of the spectatorial gaze, the spectator’s memories, that shifts and leaves without any material manifestation or trace with its fleeting or ‘vanishing acts’.
The exhibition consists of works of nineteenth-century landscape photographer, Dr. John Murray’s The Taj Mahal from the Banks of Yamuna, 1858-62, amateur Parsi photographer, Motivala’s photographs from the album, Delhi Durbar (1911), photographs from Habib Tanvir’s Agra Bazaar (1954), stills from JANAM’s performances set against the changing industrial-scape of Jhandapur celebrating the ‘Safdar Hashmi Shahadat Diwas’ (1989-present) and ATA Theatre Photography grantee (2022), Kush Kukreja’s dramatic surveying of the Yamuna river through his project, ‘Yamuna Local Stories’.