Things as They Are Seen

Revisiting his practice in photo manipulation, Agan Harahap questions the methods of storytelling through the photomanipulation process which he has developed over the years, at a time when generative AI is rapidly changing how images are made. Things as They Are Seen revisits the past through the interplay between fact and fiction, and between the past and the present. On one hand, Agan engages with factual archives, the sketches of Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn published in 1853, by appropriating their conventions of classification and documentation to manipulate history. On the other, he returns to Sutirah, a fictional character Agan created in 2015, bringing an imagined past into the present. Through these overlapping references, Agan reflects on how our understanding of the present is inevitably shaped by the ways we interpret and reconstruct the past. Together, the works ask how truthful what we perceive as truth really is when it can be manipulated, and where responsibility lies for what is presented and what is circulated.