(Ed 50) 2023, 'Some Place I Know But Have Never Been' Amrit Singh Sandhu.
Some Place I Know But Have Never Been, Sandhu’s debut photo-centric publication, extends enquiries made in her painting practice into a dissection of family history and memory, sequencing archive images and documents collected from her family home in Amritsar. Utilising the photographic tradition of cropping, Sandhu zooms in to established memories, finding new objects of focus within what she terms “surrounding, non-main-character, background information”.
Sandhu writes, “making this book has involved a direct working with photographs that I have used as reference for paintings over the past few years. Using compositions as reference for canvas works, I have become more and more interested in the physical prints themselves, many of them having worn over the years, or becoming marked with stains or annotations. […] Many of the photographs I have used were taken by my Dad - who is also a painter - on his old Kodak Brownie camera… and I have been using this same camera recently to photograph myself. In this gesture, similarly to working with these images, I feel like something is being passed on, but at the same time something old is turning into something new”
Asserting a departure from established linear memory, Some Place I Know But Have Never Been allows for new unknown moments - separate but together - to come to the surface. Sequencing images in pairs, Sandhu forms a new mental architecture within these spreads, in which conventional notions of time and space are overcome in a process or reclaiming her own mental DNA. Undoubtably harnessing a painters understanding information/data/memory as malleable form, here Sandhu asks; what remains in the ageing image, how do stories evolve over time, how does memory function as a physical art material?
