We’re taking you on a flyover of our past print issues, where you’ll soar through the highlights and spot the hidden threads connecting all these stories together.
Whose Memory Gets Remembered?
“Have you ever thought about how much history might be hiding in your old family photo albums?"
That’s the question Nepal Picture Library started asking back in 2011. Because back then, when you looked at the public images that represented Nepal, it was always the same kind of story, told by the same kind of people, from the same kind of background. So in its earliest practice, NPL began collecting personal photographs from people across generations and communities. Not official records. Not textbook history. But real, lived-in memory. Photos that are tucked away in drawers, in old albums and under the beds. The kinds of images that rarely make it into national archives. That early effort was simple but powerful. They essentially are asking, “What stories of Nepal are hiding in plain sight?”
Those early photo collections were just the beginning. Over time, NPL expanded their focus from archiving family albums to curating visual histories around social movements, sparking discussions about Indigenous identity and climate change. But even as their work has grown, the core question remains the same: Who gets remembered? And who gets left out? Whether it’s a protest on the street or a wedding photo in someone’s living room, a single image can hold a story that completely challenges what the world assumes to be true.”
Take writer Sandy Di Yu.
In 2017, Sandy came across a plaque at her university. It was a memorial for those killed at Tiananmen Square in 1989. When she took a quick photo and sent it to her mum, her response caught her off guard. She said, “Don’t trust everything from Western media.” That one line brought up something deeper, an identity crisis Sandy hadn’t fully dealt with.
For the rest of the Western world, Tiananmen Square is often remembered as a place where freedom was laid down to perish. The ‘official’ story, the one told on that plaque, repeated across textbooks and headlines, is short and clear: Students protested for democracy and freedom, and the authoritarian Chinese government silenced them with violence. But her mum insisted it wasn’t that simple. And as Sandy began looking into it herself, she discovered just how much was left out of that narrative. It wasn’t just students in the square; workers, unions, and others were there too, demanding action on inflation, corruption, and job pressures. And it wasn’t a simple fight between people and power. Students and workers didn’t always get along. So maybe, Sandy thought, it wasn’t a fight for freedom in the way we’re taught to imagine it. Not in the glossy, Western, neoliberal sense. Not about slogans, but about survival. Not always about equality, sometimes about exclusivity. But still, people were killed. So Sandy asked an important question, “Why do these details even matter?” And she reflects that the way we remember something and who gets to define what it means shapes the story that lives on.
At Goldsmiths, where that Tiananmen plaque hangs, there’s another building named after Stuart Hall, the pioneering cultural theorist who argued that “Meaning is never fixed. It’s made through representation. And representation is always tied to power.” So when the story of Tiananmen is told, by Western media, by a plaque, or by her mother, it’s not just about what happened. It’s about what it means and who makes that decision.
And for Sandy, Tiananmen Square doesn’t just hold a political symbol. It holds memory. It’s a place from her childhood. A place of fireworks, long summer visits, and teen boredom. Same place, different story. Because what that square means to her and what it means to the world are not the same.
And that’s the point. Whether it’s a picture from a family photo album in Nepal or Tiananmen Square, the meaning of an image depends on who’s telling the story. That’s why memory isn’t just personal. It’s political. And why our photos, our own memories, matter more than we think.
Technologies of Return
One technology carries a voice across distance. The other rebuilds a room across time. Both are shaped by what cannot be reached. Two different technologies. Two different eras. Both are trying to close a gap that politics created.
In the 1960s and 70s, British Pakistani migrants began recording their voices onto cassette tapes and mailing them across continents. The cassette was never designed for longing. But in their hands, it became something else. It becomes a bridge stretched across oceans. It is slow, fragile, and delayed, but deeply human.
To record a message meant locking yourself in a room, sealing the door with towels and speaking carefully, knowing this would travel for weeks. There was no instant reply, no typing indicator and no video call, just a voice sent into uncertainty.
The delay shaped the intimacy. By the time a tape arrived in Pakistan, a fever might have broken, a wedding might have passed, and someone might already be gone. But this gap became part of the message. Technology didn’t eliminate distance, it made it audible.
And because Pothwari existed primarily as an oral language, the cassette didn’t just carry affection, it preserved a linguistic world that history rarely writes down, especially women’s voices. For women who could not write letters, the tape was liberation. No daughter translating, no husband dictating, they gain complete independence on how to express themselves.
When Wajid came across these tapes in his mother’s bedroom, it took him back to those days. He realised that he was holding “a perfect snapshot of time in sound of what it was like for British Pakistanis who migrated to the UK and the effort they have made to keep in touch with their relatives back home.” This moment of realisation became the starting point for The Tape Letters Project.
Decades later, another tool would emerge, shaped by the same need to reach what cannot be reached.
For Solenne, virtual reality carried a different kind of charge. At a time when screens felt exhausting and innovation felt repetitive, VR felt alive. It had the power to captivate, to energise, to create a genuine sense of presence. “Immersive” was no longer a hollow industry buzzword; it was something that could move you.
As she explored VR’s storytelling potential, she became drawn to its ability to suspend physics and gravity, to construct spaces that no longer exist, or that exist only in memory. For her, virtual reality was not just a new medium, it was a way of carrying her grandmother back to a place she once called home.
Solenne sat with her grandmother at the dining table together as she sketched her bedroom in coloured pencils, bending her neck toward the paper, squinting through her glasses to get the proportions right. She drew each piece of furniture in three dimensions, its depth, its height, and the space between the bed and the window. She was not just drawing objects. She was drawing Palestine as she remembered it.
Why the bedroom?
Because return had become bureaucratic humiliation. When her grandmother tried to visit her ill sister in Palestine, she was made to wait outside in the rain at an Israeli embassy in Jordan, eighty-three years old, seeking permission to access the land she had once fled as a child. After hearing how difficult it was for her grandmother to return physically, Solenne wanted to take her back digitally. No passport. No visa. No border control. No waiting in the rain.
But she also wanted something universal. A bedroom is not abstract. It is where a child sleeps, cries, hides secrets, and looks out of a window. It is normal. And that normalcy was the point. To restore not just a political loss, but an interrupted ordinary life. To show that displacement did not begin with spectacle, it began with someone being forced out of a quiet childhood room.
In the final piece, the bedroom has no walls. It sits open within the neighbourhood where her grandmother grew up. Solenne did not aim for perfect realism. She understood that virtual reality does not need to replicate the world exactly; it can curate it. Her grandmother used Google Maps to locate what she remembered of her street. Solenne took 360-degree screenshots and began altering them, removing Hebrew shop signs, replacing them with signage from 1948, and reshaping details so that the space aligned with memory rather than present-day occupation.
This is not documentary neutrality. It is a curated memory. Just as the cassette tapes translated longing into sound, this project translates displacement into space. One medium made distance audible. The other makes absence inhabitable.
Both reveal the same truth: when politics closes borders, people turn to whatever technologies they have to reopen something, even if only emotionally.
Ways of Seeing: The Art of the Mundane
The rubber duck was bright yellow. Inflatable. Childlike. But it bobbed in front of riot shields as water cannons fired into a crowd of protesters. It looked ridiculous. And that was the point.
Beneath the surface of the lightness of humour sits something heavier. It is a way of negotiating chaos, authority, and the everyday absurdities of life.
“Receh” humour, we’d called it in Indonesia. The kind of joke that feels almost throwaway, but somehow sustains you. Like instant noodles after a long day. When Jakarta floods, people laugh and swim in the water pooling around their homes. When a political scandal trends online, witty responses multiply within hours. Meme pages flourish as irony travels faster than outrage.
Michelle’s sticker collections are born from those moments. She gathers fragments from daily life, such as popular culture references, shared inconveniences, and fleeting emotions, and distils them into illustrations that feel instantly familiar. Her style, pieced together from thousands of artworks she has absorbed over the years, is scrappy and personal. It morphs as she morphs. And in its relatability lies its power.
“Might as well have fun while you’re at it,” she says.
The phrase sounds carefree, but it carries a subtle defiance. If systems are slow to change and frustrations are constant, then humour becomes a form of agency. It is a way for us to say: we see the absurdity, and we refuse to be crushed by it.
In Thailand, that refusal has taken striking forms. During protests calling for reform of the monarchy, demonstrators borrowed from Harry Potter’s Wizarding World, referring to the king as “You Know Who”, a coded jab in a country where direct criticism can lead to severe punishment under lese-majeste laws. Fiction became camouflage. Satire became a shield. The now-iconic inflatable rubber ducks were first props of mockery, then became literal barriers against state force. It was theatrical, playful, but also strategic.
Street photographer Poupay grew up within that culture of sharp wit and creative resistance. Now based in New York, she carries that sensibility into her practice. She wanders chaotic streets and photographs what others overlook: piles of trash after Lunar New Year celebrations, awkward moments, and the beautifully mundane. Using flash, a technique associated with glossy commercial photography, she illuminates objects that are not meant to be desirable.
In doing so, she exposes how easily perception can be manipulated. If lighting can make anything look beautiful, what else have we been taught to desire without questioning? She asked. Poupay mirrors the technique of commercial photography to quietly unravel what it does.
Michelle and Poupay, though working in different mediums and contexts, remind us that seeing is never passive; it is a deliberate act of reframing. Michelle chose to see the frustrations of everyday life by making fun of them, turning inconvenience into wit. Poupay, on the other hand, reframes the undesirable by glamorising it, placing the overlooked under bright light and asking us to reconsider its value.