By focussing on the mediums of Polaroid photography and film, my praxis-based research, which culminated in my exhibition Knowing and Un-Knowing: The Affective Relations of Images (2023) explores how art can rouse the viewer’s imagination to participate in the sense and sensations of an artwork, which are its untranslatable forces, thereby offering a unique opportunity to re-encounter and re-present traumatic historical events. The project demonstrates how the image is never fully formed or static for observational interpretation, but always relational and orientated towards an anterior future. By invoking the workings of the image and the imagination, the exhibition aimed to engender an opportunity to encounter time as heterogeneous and multi-directional, where the logics ascribed to causal chronological time is disrupted and problematised. Strategies that draw attention to materiality, haptics, fragmentation of images and discontinuities of narrative with dialectics of montage are central to my inquiry. These are strategies that prioritise particularity, where the subjective imbricates with the historical, social and cultural. The exhibition endeavoured to show how art can reposition history outside the constraints of disciplinary practices so that it enters the ambiguous realm of subjective un-knowing – contingent, indeterminate and open-ended that presents the past from which further becomings may emerge.
