Editorial: Visual Narratives – ULR Issue 14, Witness

What does it mean to be present and bear witness? What are we choosing to acknowledge in the act of witnessing – and what are we choosing to shelve and forget when we unwitness?

To see is to witness is perhaps not always so. Yet, to see, to choose what and how exactly is that you want to see and elide into a narrative is an unique and significant kind of witnessing.’

Vrinda Varma’s notes from her sketchbook during a solo trip to Prague gives a window into an alternative way to witness and experience a trip,  to journey away documenting through the phone and instead pay homage to the experience through the matrix of hand and art. ’In  sketching, I was not storing data,’ she says, ‘I was staying in the moment. I was learning to remember.’

From the terrace of her ancestral house, Nilofer Haja’s Liminal Gali trains her monochrome lens upon those who pass by, their presence doubled through body and shadow; the series in her words ‘asks what it means to record a community when the recorder is both kin and outsider.

Through Myrfei’s witnessing of all those objects that accumulate on the rooftops in a Pakistani context with curiosity and attention against their supposed invisibility,’ the act ‘becomes a small act of everyday resistance and claiming agency.