From queer relationships and migration to AI and colonial histories, a huge range of artists have spliced together photography and archive material to create images that challenge history as we know it
When the artist Sunil Gupta found out he was HIV positive in July 1995, making a collage helped him to process how he felt. He used an image of himself taken on the day of his diagnosis clutching his knees and looking defiantly into the camera, then placed it, using Photoshop, between the bars of the M25 bridge crossing, which look as though they’re imprisoning him. “It was the day my life changed,” he says.
“Photography was a great tool for therapy,” Gupta says, and collaging “was very freeing, to get rid of those boundaries and put elements together.” On his new Apple computer, he merged low-resolution photographs he’d taken of posters and graffiti in Berlin; a zoomed-in picture of a 1930s gay bar the Nazis closed down; self-portraits and scans from books. He explored queer relationships, migration and his concerns around Thatcher taking Britain into Europe. “All of the messaging at the time, very similar to now, was about being a stranger in a strange land,” says Gupta. “I’ve been here since the 70s and I’m seventysomething but I still feel precarious.”
