Boudinet’s Curtain
Mayank Agarwal

Preview: Tuesday 21 October 2025, 6pm
Continues until Saturday 15 November 2025

Roland Barthes in his seminal book 'La Chambre Claire' finds the essence of photography in its puncture of time. The past comes alive and confronts us like a sensuous being. The photograph serves as an index of intractable reality, an authenticating evidence of time, a testimony of truth. But whose sense of time and truth does a photograph index? In my project, ‘Queer Childhoods’, conversations and interviews with queer individuals about their childhood photographs makes clear that imbricated in the ‘record’ of childhood photographs are embedded silences and ghostly spectres of uncaptured subjectivities. Imaginaries that you cannot see but can only listen to.

In the frontispiece of Barthes’ book is a photograph by Daniel Boudinet, simply titled 'Polaroïd, 1979'. In the image, through the diaphaneity of the curtain, appears the soft edges of a bed and a cushion in a barely visible room. In this work, I draw these curtains as the symbolic surface for the photograph. Behind the facade of Boudinet’s curtain lies domesticity with its soft-edged clarity mired in darkness. How do we enter this domestic space of photography? Does the image lie beyond the photograph and can a voice enter an image? Is it possible to listen to a photograph?


Mayank Agarwal is a genderqueer artist-researcher based in New Delhi, whose work experiments with notions of material, memory and time. Their practice spans a vast spectrum of methodologies, research disciplines and mediums from photography, video and image-making to cultural and media studies, with a focus on queering the divisions and neatly packed boundaries between artistic, archival and research practice. Their exploration into media practice is attuned within a participatory approach that prioritises an ethics of listening in studying visuality.