Anamorphosis is simultaneously sweeping and granular, breaking up allusive collages with strips of text on the experiences of Palestinians the artist encountered. Soi never omits the particularities of his subjectivity as an outsider, adding personal reflections on the historical linkages between Sebastia and Punjab, where his father was born, and recollections of Kolkata educed by the sights and sounds of the West Bank.

Soi, a student of the pioneering essay filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, brings some of the genre’s sensibilities to the artists’ book form by way of gesture and montage. A logic of imbrication emphasises the coexistence of numerous perspectives, possibilities and linkages with seemingly faraway geographies. Outlines of one image hosting the details of another makes apparent the connections between the struggles of the Kashmiri and Palestinian peoples. The ‘freeze frame’ aesthetic that converts the cinematographic into the photographic imparts a degree of certainty often missing in the story of conflict zones. Seeing has in many cultures been conflated with knowing, vision a method of substantiating belief. In Anamorphosis, iconicity becomes proof of presence in embattled regions, the visit itself a political act, as curator Reem Fadda has pointed out. The book provides an elegant coda to an artwork seeking to understand fundamentally unknowable pain by looking closely.