She extracts from these archives in series; groups of women posing while having tea, pairs of animals, vintage gymnastics tutorials. The subject matter is varied but the pretence under which they were collated remains the same — as images which seek to make the myriad complexities of the world understandable, categorisable. Rathi’s series Songs of the Sky explores hierarchies of knowledge and language, using archival imagery and text to reinterpret traditional notions of organisation and categorisation. Through a process of research and reframing, Rathi questions traditional distinctions between the sciences and the arts, and spirituality and rationality.

Taking these archival photographs, Rathi collages them, and pairs them with handwritten text, which references the natural and spiritual worlds. The texts are part diary entries, part ecological musings, part manifesto. Rather than explaining the images, the writing moves alongside them, bridging the gap between rationality and spirituality, between the earth and the sky.

Together, these works combine fact and fiction, resulting not in resolved, finite statements, but in fantastical compositions which resist categorisation, instead offering a constellation of relations, and opportunities for connection.

RADHA RATHI lives and works in Chennai, India. She returns to themes of human behaviour and the nature of emotions, often thinking about memory —how it shifts when revisited, becoming distant from reality, yet holding a quiet tenderness. She works across photography, film, and collage, and is interested in what cannot be fully understood — space, hyper-reality, spirituality, nature. Rather than trying to resolve these, Rathi makes images that hold more than one meaning, leaving space to enter and stay with what you find.

ISABEL WALTER is a writer and curator based in Amsterdam. She currently works as Assistant Curator at Foam, and Editorial Assistant at Foam Magazine. She is particularly interested in art which expands the technical and conceptual boundaries of photography, moving image and new technologies.