Borobudur 1947 - 1948

This is a page from an anonymous photo album, the photographs depict images of Borobudur and were stuck in place with octagon-shaped paper mounts. The album has faded with age to a kind of dark beige and the photos are small, each of them depicting a memory and a place that is far away. There are even handwritten place names for each of them, scrawled in what looks like black ink. The photo on the top left depicts Borobudur, a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple in Indonesia. I'm interested in the act of archiving, how it constructs new meanings and ways of seeing. The faded colours and the sepia of the photos suggest a sense of nostalgia and longing, evoking a past that is both personal and historical. The octagonal shapes remind me of the modularity of Sol LeWitt's structures or Agnes Martin's grids, but here they function as prosaic picture frames. Ultimately, this album is an invitation to reflect on the nature of memory, representation, and the passage of time, something all artists must wrestle with.