Simultaneous Realities
Radha Datta
Field notes on Simultaneous Realities
Hadi Nasiri
Stepping into a museum rarely means entering a singular regime of looking. It means inhabiting a field of overlapping, simultaneou modes of attention—rapture, distraction, reverence, fatigue, casualness, memory. Simultaneous Realities vol. 1 takes this condition as its starting point. What comes into view is not the museum as a sanctuary of contemplation, but as a polyphonic stage: a space where bodies, behaviors, technologies, and rituals interlace without resolving into coherence.
The book does not describe simultaneity so much as enact it. Black-and-white photographs register visitors leaning, scrolling, pausing, or rushing through galleries. Handwritten notes—collected on slips of paper—interrupt the images with fragments of testimony: memories, confessions, doodles, banalities. Short essays, grouped under section titles drawn from Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, and Persian (SMRTI, MASKAN, VAYA, TAMASHA), frame these sequences. Visual, textual, personal, and institutional registers are folded into a single rhythm. Reading the book becomes an exercise in holding multiple attentional states at once.
Encountered this way, Simultaneous Realities sits downstream from the essayistic photobooks of Allan Sekula and alongside Thomas Struth’s Museum Photographs or Candida Höfer’s interiors, while updating that lineage for the smartphone era. Screens and reflections are no longer props at the edge of the frame; they function as co-actors in the dramaturgy of looking. Devices do not simply interrupt attention—they reorganize it.
What remains notable is the book’s refusal of moralism. Rather than lamenting the supposed erosion of attention, distraction is treated as meaningful. A child running through a gallery or a visitor taking a selfie does not signal failure but participation. Walter Benjamin’s notion of “distracted reception” finds a contemporary echo here, not as loss but as a legitimate mode of spectatorship. Smartphones appear less as contaminants than as scaffolds: tools for archiving memory, circulating images, and enabling co-looking across distance. In this sense, the selfie becomes not only a record but a small claim of presence within the institution.
The handwritten notes further complicate authorship. Lines such as “I remember coming here with my grandmother” insert biography into architecture, folding lived memory into institutional space. Museums appear not only as archives of objects, but as repositories of personal histories that briefly surface and then recede. Authorship is dispersed, though never fully relinquished.
Still, certain tensions remain unresolved. Photography always entails an ethical relation, as Ariella Azoulay reminds us. While Datta’s images of visitors are tactful, the book remains largely silent on questions of consent and method. Are these acts of documentation, or of extraction? Do the visitor notes puncture the book’s authority, or are they aestheticized into its frame? These questions linger, productively, but without explicit acknowledgement.
The focus on the physical white cube also narrows the field. Museums today unfold as much through Instagram feeds, Google Arts interfaces, and algorithmic recommendations as through their galleries. Hito Steyerl’s “poor images” circulate widely, shaping publics long before encounters with original objects occur. Simultaneous Realities gestures toward this expanded field but does not fully enter it.
Access to spectatorship is likewise uneven. While Datta’s photographs suggest diversity, the conditions that structure who enters museums, who feels authorized to linger, and who contributes handwritten notes remain largely unaddressed. As Tony Bennett and Brian O’Doherty have shown, the museum is not only a stage but a disciplinary apparatus. Without engaging these asymmetries, simultaneity risks appearing neutral when it is, in fact, stratified.
What Simultaneous Realities vol. 1 ultimately offers is not resolution but a method. Its hybrid form—photographs, testimony, essay—embeds its argument within its structure. The multilingual section titles provincialize the Western canon and gesture toward a more plural register of spectatorship. Most importantly, the book refuses nostalgia. At a moment when museums are pressured to democratize access and expand digitally, Datta treats the institution not as a temple of reverence but as a messy, contradictory site where devotion and distraction coexist.
What remains open is not a failure of the work, but its most generative tension: simultaneity as lived condition rather than settled concept. The book documents the museum not as myth or ideal, but as a reality inhabited unevenly, moment by moment. Read as fieldwork rather than as verdict, Simultaneous Realities invites attention not to what the museum should be, but to how it is already being lived.
References
(FWP note: references function here as working tools, not as claims to authority.)
Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books, 2008.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” 1936/2008.
Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum. Routledge, 1995.
Jurgenson, Nathan. The Social Photo. Verso, 2019.
O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube. University of California Press, 1999.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Verso, 2009.
Sekula, Allan. Photography Against the Grain. MIT Press, 1984.