Bindi Vora: Mountain of Salt, a year of pandemic language

Mountain of Salt

Mountain of Salt, made across 2020 and 2021, is an expansive body of work built from found images, appropriated text and digital shape collages, conceived initially as a human response to the unfolding of the coronavirus pandemic. Vora has described becoming acutely aware in March 2020 of the landscape everyone was suddenly living in, where everything felt amplified — clinging to the news for updates, statistics and curves, and analysing the many forms in which information was being shared. What the process highlighted for her was that words and speech have a physical presence, a bearing, and carry weight.

The series is therefore text-based by design. The collages draw on words and sentences collected over the year from politicians, journalists and individuals sharing commentary, updates or thoughts, and as each wave and lockdown unfolded across the UK the work was punctuated by the other events of the period — questions of equality, hyper-vigilance, Brexit, pledges of reform, and prolonged stretches of stillness — bookended by some of the lighter moments the same period produced.

The shapes in the works are doing semantic rather than decorative work. The rhetoric of collective responsibility, togetherness and unity pushed from positions of power is answered by forms that are not only there to direct the eye or to create a pause, but to be read for the etymological weight of what they represent. What the collection of phrases finally speaks to is the dissemination of language and its effect on the people receiving it.

Materials that carry their own history

Vora is a British-Indian contemporary photographic artist, curator and lecturer whose practice uses various analogue processes and often takes its material from her immediate surroundings, including her personal archive.

Her stated interest is in the way materials or ephemera can be reused and recycled to create new narratives that remain traceable back to earlier works — she has described the relationship as one of interconnected tissues. That is a precise description of what Mountain of Salt does with a year of public speech.

Exhibitions, commissions and collections

Since graduating from the University of Westminster in 2013 with a BA in photographic arts, Vora has exhibited in thematic exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including at the Photographers' Gallery, Yinka Shonibare's Guest Projects, 180 The Strand, the V&A Museum of Childhood, Phoenix Gallery, the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the Benaki Museum in Athens and Art Stage Singapore.

Her work has been published in PYLOT, Capricious and Loose Associations, and she was named one to watch by The Wick Culture in 2021. In 2019 she was commissioned to create a new work by Hospital Rooms on behalf of the NHS psychiatric intensive care unit in Exeter.

Her works have been acquired by the Women's Art Library at Goldsmiths, the Franklin Furnace artist book collection at the Museum of Modern Art, Self Publish Be Happy at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Imperial Health Charity, the Hyman Collection and Guy's and St Thomas' Foundation, alongside private collections.

One consequence of working with appropriated speech is that the archive of the work is also an archive of a year. Read now, the collected phrases function as a record of how institutions spoke during the first waves of the pandemic, which is material that ages differently from photographs of the same period.

Vora's parallel career as a curator is legible in the work's construction, and the connection is more than biographical trivia. Curating is the discipline of arranging existing material so that the arrangement itself makes an argument, and Mountain of Salt applies exactly that discipline to found language — collecting, selecting, sequencing and weighting phrases the way an exhibition weights works in a room. It is also why the series holds together across such disparate registers, from government briefing to private message: the collages give each phrase the same formal treatment, which levels the authority of the speakers and lets the reader hear how differently the same period sounded depending on who was describing it. The title's gesture — a mountain built from grains of salt, each phrase small and the accumulation enormous — is the method stated as an image.