Chennai Photo Biennale goes hybrid; invites us to reorient how we view history

This is the third edition of the exhibition and features multiple lenses, locations, voices and visual performances

Community of Parting is a 70-minute film in ‘Maps of Disquiet’, the hybrid exhibition stitched between virtual space and physical venues, part of the third edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB).

The film, by Copenhagen-based Jane Jin Kaisen, documents the stories of war, loss, and pain that women in particular embody. Tracing itself to a Korean myth about goddess Bari and her abandonment as a child, the film leads one through the reconciliation and healing practices among women shamans who transit between the living and the dead. They find voices for the dead to come alive in the present, to strengthen and comfort the living through the continuity of grief.

There is a philosophy. “I understand social death to be the ultimate abandonment, but the shamanistic approach would be that which opens up and enables, if you are outside of conventional notions of history and conventional notions of space and time. You can see different things. You need this kind of death to be able to have a more complex image of the world and of the relation. So then and there become completely different concepts. It is not a singular event. You have to orient yourself permanently, every day in relation to history, to time, to space,” narrates the voice of a woman juxtaposed with the image of a waterfall, two poles at the bottom standing upright from the rocks, human-like, fragile paper cutouts dangling on each of them. The image moves slowly to the close-up of a translucent paper face, letting the golden sunlight pass through, arms flapping in the wind.