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Anshul Roy

Untitled (Rage Against the Archive Browser Plugin) 2023 — Untitled (Rage Against the Archive browser plugin), 2023

Rage Against the Archive 2023 — Screengrab (Rage Against the Archive), 2023

Rage Against the Archive #2 — Screengrab #2 (Rage Against the Archive), 2023

Anshul Roy

Website: anshulroy.com
Ins: @sugrabheeta

Artist Statement

My artistic practice is inspired by postcolonial discourses, exploring issues like identity, historical memory and cultural representation, with a specific interest in probing how the Britishers employed photography in colonial India for “othering” and how these ethnographic photos exist in contemporary institutional archives.

The series Rage Against the Archive consists of experimental browser-based videos that critically probe how the New York Public Library's website catalogs, displays, and sells dehumanizing photos from the 19th-century ethnographic book "The People of India," questioning capitalism’s infusion with the archival process, and documents the “hacking” methodology used to insert different texts in a symbolic act of electronic civil disobedience.

As a conceptual artist working with photography, I embrace this new reality of our digital era, where most images exist as computational objects on a screen. Hence, I use the internet both as a canvas and source material to “activate the archives” and recontextualize its information.