'LATITUDE 28 presents Long Short Stories, a long awaited solo exhibition by Waswo X. Waswo, an American-born artist who has made Udaipur, Rajasthan, his home for over two decades. His practice layers photography with traditional Indian painting, working closely with local miniature painters, and it is in this collaborative method that his central preoccupation lives: his work is dense with narrative that interweaves history, colonialism, and contemporary identity, often casting Waswo himself as a bumbling foreign protagonist who is observed, embraced, and gently mocked by the Indians around him. Being an American artist working within India's "exotic" visual traditions, Waswo has long used his own practice to interrogate the legacy of the colonial and orientalist gaze, restaging and subverting the imagery and instruments once used by outsiders to study and categorise the Indian "native", while treating Udaipur not as a backdrop for his work but as the place that has shaped it. His work is held in institutional collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore, among others.
Long Short Stories unfolds through a fictional narrative of encounters, desire, secrecy, exile, and memory. At the centre of the exhibition is the story of a Dandy who travels from a Distant Land into an Ancient Land, carrying with him the tools of observation and remembrance. His journey leads him to a secluded Ancient City, where an unexpected friendship with the Prince gradually develops into a relationship shaped by fascination, intimacy, rivalry, and ultimately exile.
The Dandy arrives as an observer, studying the flora, fauna, geography, and people of the Ancient Land through an artist’s eye. His telescope, binoculars, magnifying glass, and camera become instruments of looking and remembering, seemingly benign yet carrying an inherent power. His encounter with the Prince introduces another form of knowledge: an Ancient Magic that belongs to the land and has been forgotten elsewhere. Their friendship becomes a meeting of two distinct worlds, each possessing its own forms of observation, knowledge, and magic.
As their relationship deepens, the boundaries between observation and participation begin to dissolve. The Prince secures the Dandy’s freedom and protection to roam the Ancient City and its surrounding lands, allowing him to continue his practice of observing and learning. Yet their shared fascination also gives way to competition, as the two begin challenging one another through duels of magic. Around them, suspicion and resentment grow, with the Dandy increasingly perceived as an outsider whose presence and unfamiliar ways threaten established structures within the kingdom.
The story culminates in the Prince and the Dandy fleeing the Ancient City together. Faced with the possibility of death and ostracisation, they choose exile, leaving behind a story whose ending remains unknown. Their legend survives, even as the details of what became of them disappear from history.
The exhibition takes its title from the idea of stories that remain unspoken because they are too personal, painful, forbidden, scandalous, or intimate to enter the public record. Such stories are sealed in silence by those who experienced them, disappearing first through the act of silence and then through the gradual erasure of memory. Yet the absence of these stories does not make them insignificant. As the text accompanying the exhibition suggests, these untold experiences continue to shape the universe, even when their weight can no longer be measured or their voices heard.
Through this fictional world, Waswo considers the fragile space between history and memory, fact and invention, observation and experience. The Dandy’s journey becomes a meditation on the ways in which encounters are remembered, suppressed, transformed into legend, or lost altogether. The exhibition foregrounds stories that exist at the margins of official histories, asking what remains when an experience is known only to those who lived it.
Long Short Stories is ultimately concerned with the quiet persistence of memory. Like a poem spoken into an empty forest, the stories at its centre may leave no immediate witness, yet their existence continues to resonate.
Long Short Stories is on view at LATITUDE 28 until 20th November, 2026.
Images & Words Courtesy Latitude 28
Date 22.10.2026
