Pipe & Turpentine Studio

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There is a moment—fleeting yet insistent—when the visible world seems to slip, slightly, from its axis. This moment of hesitation, suspended between recognition and estrangement, lies at the heart of Dogra Magra. In a time marked by fractured histories and displaced identities, Dogra Magra adopts the fantastic not to escape, but to engage with the structural instabilities of our present. While inspired by the European tradition of the fantastic—its long-standing engagement with the supernatural, the uncanny, and the thresholds of perception—this work does not seek to depict the fantastic per se. Rather, it adopts its logic, its structural syntax, as a way of articulating deeper disruptions: psychic, historical, and cultural. These Störungen are not narrative motifs, but the very fabric of the work, woven through photographic fragments, archival residues, and textual echoes.

 

Informed by Todorov’s notion of the fantastic as a “hesitation” between rational and supernatural explanations, the series navigates spaces of ambiguity where meaning remains unresolved. It is not the absence of reality that matters here, but its expansion—its doubling—into realms where perception trembles and identity blurs.

 

Over several years, the project has evolved through phases of recomposition. From the photographic book Flâneur(2019), which gathered visual memory as fragment, to the atlas-form (2020) that layered images and external materials into unstable constellations, and finally to its confluence with the family-based research in Pipe, Turpentine and Fugue(2024), Dogra Magra has remained a space of speculative reconstruction: of selves, of memory, of belonging.

 

Ultimately, the work does not offer resolution. It opens a passage—a corridor of images—through which the viewer is invited to linger, hesitate, and perhaps see anew. In this liminal terrain, the fantastic is not a genre, but a lens through which the fractures of reality become momentarily visible.