"IT LOOKS BETTER ON INSTAGRAM": NETWORKED PHOTOGRAPHY AND PUBLIC ART IN MUMBAI

In this paper, I discuss networked photography practices and selfiecultures at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, an annual cultural festival in Mumbai, todemonstrate how global digital visual cultures are translated in the urban Indian context,and offer new ways of thinking about the conceptualisation and experience of art, the cityand the resident. I argue that the desire for networked photography that animates theassemblage of installations, artists, visitors, curators, camera technologies and socialnetworking sites, alters ideas of space and place, and object production and meaning making.I approach the selfie and everyday networked photography as a form of self-expression,labour (Abidin 2016), locative media (Hess 2015), embodied socialisation (Frosh 2015) and amode of photography that collapses binaries of subject/object, spectator/operator andcurated image/curator (Frosh 2015, Senft and Baym 2015). I use qualitative digital methods,interviews, audiovisual documentation and autoethnography. Through visuals recorded in theexhibition area at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in 2020, I demonstrate how the unique senseof intimacy and limited field of vision offered by the lens and screen of the camera phone,turn the exhibition space into a space of embodied interdependence and collaboration. At thesame time, as a result of the neoliberal logic of commodification of the algorithms ofsocial networking sites, postcolonial place is rendered ahistorical and reinterpreted as aspace for creative photography and the visual production of a global digitalidentity.