The Animate Circuit of the Ordinary: The Everyday as Unfolding in Tarun Bhartiya’s Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep

Abstract

Drawing on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s description of the ordinary as an “animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes and disjunctures,” this article reads the representations of the fugitive potentials of the quotidian in Shillong-based artist Tarun Bhartiya’s photomontage/postcard collection Niam/Faith/Hynñiewtrep (2021). Focusing on Bhartiya’s utilization of the technique of montage and the poetic juxtaposition of text and images, I consider the pluriversal narratives of pasts, presents and futures in his representations of the ordinary and the quotidian in a frontier/borderland space like Northeast India as a contribution to the nascent field of visual studies and the photographic archive in the region. This essay evaluates the significance of avant-garde visual practices, like those of Bhartiya’s, in probing the minutiae of ordinary life and its fugitive and unpredictable potentialities.