Presencing the past, a montage experience: walking through a series of temporal nodes

Cartography is about plotting and depositing in time and space. As an artist cum auto-visual ethnographer, I have assembled several pairs and clusters of photographic images and collage works pertaining to my work on the history of everyday life.
Cartography of time points to historiography, which is why I invoke Walter Benjamin’s notion of montage – to articulate the critical and narrative potentials of isolated image objects, each with its own phenomenological description of specific space-time, yet together they form a landscape that does not hide its own gaps, silences and absences.
Each pair/cluster constructs a critical trope of varied magnitude: 1841-1930-2006, 1950s-1970s, 2000-2004-2017, 1995-1997-2014, a single moment in 2003, a virtual moment of artistic invention, political occupation Vs art and fiction, sentiments Vs numbers, the spy world and health techniques, from health, leisure to espionage, personal obsessions, Hong Kong, Britain… Together these image clusters embody the contemporaneity of many single moments of different on-going processes of incommensurable time scales, all residing in stratagem of the image.
To Walter Benjamin, montage points to a dialectical mode of historical understanding. In assembling and narrating my images, I dream of the future by waking up from the present where the past also inhabits.