Sl(e)ight of Hand: On Vani Bhushan’s Elements of Protest
by Alfonse Chiu
plane (noun)
- SURFACE; in mathematics, a flat or level surface that continues in all directions:
- LEVEL; a particular level or standard
from the Cambridge Dictionary
‘In Plane View Of’ is an exercise in looking. Not seeing, no; looking. To look is to focus, is to be intentional in where one lets one’s gaze fall, is to notice where eyes fail and brain kicks in as the first gesture of imagination—about that which lies beyond the frame of the image, about the actions and gestures continued by the photographed subject(s) an infinitesimal moment after the photo-chemical or electronic cascades that produce image has passed, about who was it that pressed the shutter. In every case, the view is the subject of an interrogation: whose perspectives, whose directives, whose narratives? Here, a plane is both heuristics and hermeneutics. Bound to the same surface, the same level, the homogeneity of the planar view belies the burden of attendance that prefigures the conditions of looking as a matter of chance virtuosity, disentangled from the privileges that regulate ingress at very fundamental levels: in order to look from the same vantage point, you must first be there to start.
Across Vani Bhushan’s practice, she imagines where circumstances forbid her from looking and proposes a novel politics for absences produced through systems of exclusion. She questions the industry and professional practices of photojournalism in India as infrastructures of non-presence that assemble, reify, and, crucially, forget. But memory itches like a phantom limb that you never knew you lost; and to scratch she has to make, has to take, has to fake. The celebrated feminist scholar and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha notes: “There is no such thing as documentary”. What then of the documentarian? Are they charlatan or adept? Dramaturg or stage manager? In Bhushan’s works, the documentarian impulse is what enables the dissolution and reformation of photojournalistic conventions for a new subjectivity of looking, one marked by speculation as a means of restoring access. Weaving together strands of observation on extant choreographies of political bodies, Bhushan fabricates instances of bearing witness to potential histories that draw into view the formal artifices underpinning photojournalism as style and genre. Presented in a new installation format that draws on the interior architecture and visual language of the press office, where images and texts are processed into narrative representations, ‘In Plane View Of’ draws on two series of works that advance Bhushan’s arguments.
In the series ‘Untitled, India’ (2024–2025) for example, a combination of ambivalent landscapes and ambiguous gesture serve as ciphers to create not just the auratic pall of peril and threat that underwrite photojournalistic labour, but also the performative tropes that characterise protest photography: the roving police officer; the hosed protesters; the abandoned casualty; the stormed office in disarray, obscured by a blizzard of disrupted paperwork. Through staging these plausible and probable scenes—amalgamated and directed from archival photographs of protest that was acquired from informal circulations—with prop uniforms, hired actors, found locations, and analogue special effects, Bhushan’s strategic uncoupling of truth from fact serves to highlight the leaps of faith inherently afforded, and often granted uncritically, to images derived from the performance of the photojournalist-as-author(ity), usually by men of a certain class and creed within the gendered milieus of image production.
Meanwhile, in the series ‘Waiting on Images That Won’t Appear’ (2025), Bhushan explores the roles of seriality and invisibility in constructing narratives within the standard story-forms of photojournalism. Over four photographs, each subtitled sequentially under the main title Waiting on Images That Won’t Appear, (2019), a black block obscures half the image, which appears to depict a moment of police brutality in media res, rendering the concealed areas of the visual field a latent space of further intrigue and violence by both inducing the need to extrapolate from what is visible and suggesting that the obscuration could arise as a result of mechanical and procedural disturbance to the act of photography. Similarly, by placing dates in parenthesis within the title, Bhushan further suggests a presumption of facticity to the visualised event’s historical occurrence. Toying with the multiple conventions of staging and presentation, Bhushan asks the viewer a deceptive simple question: “What do you think you are looking at?”
The answer is looking right back at you, but you don’t know it yet.∎
Artist Biography
Vani Bhushan (b. 1998, New Delhi) is a photographer based between New York and New Delhi. Her work questions the limits of witnessing; she photographs landscapes shaped by protest and erasure in India. Lingering in the spaces of the provisional—where looking is uncertain and presence always conditional—Bhushan’s practice traces the image as a site of discomfort where the photograph does not resolve but instead hovers, marked by denial and delayed by desire. Using photography and moving image, she considers what remains when visibility falters. For Bhushan, to look is not passive; it is personal, and never without risk. Bhushan holds a MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art, and has presented her works at Webber Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Gladstone Gallery (New York, NY), Green Hall Gallery (New Haven, CT), Khoj (New Delhi), and the National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi) amongst others. She was the recipient of the 2025 John Ferguson Weir Award and the 2024 Alice Kimball English Travel Fellowship.
Curator Biography
Alfonse Chiu (b. 1997, Taipei) is a writer, designer, and curator based between Taipei, Singapore, and New York. Working across contemporary art, architecture, performance, and cinema, Chiu’s research-based practice seeks to excavate the subterranean processes and infrastructures underpinning capital and ideological flows in post-colonial South/East Asia. Through exhibitions, publications, and performances, Chiu identifies how regimes of power and knowledge manifest through the production and circulation of visual, material, and spatial cultures to structure social definitions of value, property, and desire. They have presented curatorial projects at Medialab Matadero (Madrid), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Loop Festival (Barcelona), DECK (Singapore), Fotoaura Institute of Photography (Tainan), among others. Their texts have been commissioned by institutions including the Asian Film Archive, Berlin International Film Festival, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Nieuwe Instituut, and the Nasher Sculpture Center; and published in periodicals including ArtReview, ArtAsiaPacific, Ocula, and Hyperallergic. They were the fall 2021 e-flux journal fellow, a 2025 European architecture platform LINA fellow, and a cohort laureate of the inaugural Young Climate Prize 2023, organized by The World Around.
In Plane View Of is on view at Khoj Studios, New Delhi from September 15 – September 20, 2025 | 11am – 6:30pm.