Once associated with institutions that collected and preserved official documents as records for future generations, scholars today understand archives as epistemological sites that render selected histories and stories audible, legible, and visible. Colonial, corporate, police, and state archives in particular operate with agendas and biases. By design, ignorance, or neglect, they can render other histories and stories inaudible, illegible, and invisible and research-led visual arts practice.

The work refigures gulfs, oceans, seas, and their shores as potential archives. In my collaborative work with Alia Yunis and our contributors, we noticed aspects of the Persian/Arabian Gulf’s history to be mediated in photographs and films produced in littoral areas by heterogeneous populations of colonial subjects, national citizens, and noncitizen residents, including unarchived and often unarchivable materials, such as letters recorded on audiocassettes and videos uploaded to file-sharing platforms, which were as often more important than official photographs and records (Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 14.1–2, 2021; Reorienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean Meet, 2024).

As a body of water, the Gulf served as a method for noticing details, often occluded in national terms after independence, thus challenging Western-imposed regions and states. Rather than understanding bodies of water as borders between distinct “nations” or states, we understood them as conduits between multiple overlapping cultures—an intervention into film studies, which organizes history within national and world frameworks, but also an intervention into area studies, which tends to privilege literal over figurative kinds of evidence. It also resonates with other fields.

Fluid and littoral places can unsettle terracentrism, described by Eric Paul Roorda as a “tendency to consider the world and human activity mainly in the context of the land and events that take place on land” (“Introduction,” The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics, 2020: 1). Today, bodies of water are places where histories and stories can evade detection, much like piracy avoids written documents imposed by dominant international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization. They can also become refuges amid enhanced militarization of movement across state borders and within international waters that followed modern colonialism.

Before the arrival of colonizers from the European subcontinent, Indian Ocean worlds were shaped by what Abdul Sheriff calls “the mercantile milieu in the ocean,” where monsoons, pilgrimages, and trade promoted “cultural and religious diversity and tolerance” that today has dissolved into “the capitalist world economy” (“Introduction,” The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies, 2014: 2–3). These two historical worlds continue to interact.

Historical worlds have been polluted by global trade’s container ships, powered by fossil-fuel combustion that enhances global warming and disrupts predictable weather patterns. They have also been traumatized by neoliberal practices that operate with relative impunity to human-rights violations, yet convivialities survive in ways that evade official archives. Research-led arts practice contributes to the de-regionalization of the so-called “Middle East” by tracing linkages before modern colonialism.


Scholars also consider sites where histories and stories accumulate outside official archiving initiatives, including in and on bodies, including human bodies alongside land and water bodies. Such bodies offer valuable insights into history in Indian Ocean worlds. In this article, I trace how Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran’s film From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf and Huda Tayob’s multimedia installation Index of Edges emerge at the confluence of critical archive studies, Indian Ocean studies,


For historians, Ann Laura Stoler describes increased attention to archives as structures of knowledge in addition to attention to the documents they contain—that is, a “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject” (“Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 2002: 93). Such attention can locate “small gestures of refusal and silence among the colonized” (99), so she reminds historians that “to understand an archive, one needs to understand the institutions that it served” (107).

To upset power asymmetries, oral archives include new recording that articulates histories and stories uncontained by written documents. File-sharing platforms can also unsettle assumptions



Founder of the Internet Archive, Rick Prelinger, describes YouTube as the world’s largest “non-archive archive” (“Beyond Noblesse Oblige,” 2021: 146), since files are uploaded by a decentralized array of non-archivists. While it is easy to celebrate such free-to-use file-sharing platforms as more “democratic,” Prelinger calls attention to their potential to be used for surveillance. He cautions against an early emphasis, particularly in the privileged “wired world” of the 1990s, on access as an unequivocal goal.

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf—Kutchi Vahan Pani Wala, 2009–2013—by the Bandra-based collective CAMP and directed by its founders Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, conveys Indian Ocean worlds through sonic and unarchived dimensions of fluid and littoral places joined by the Gulf of Kutch, Persian/Arabian Gulf, and Gulf of Aden 

In particular, he finds that “expanded access to archival materials has not necessarily benefited communities that have long experienced the continuing violences of colonialism, racism, enslavement, and genocide” (147). Artists develop relationships with participants in ways that attempt to avoid anthropological, documentary, and ethnographic practices that reproduce “archival labour as extractive” (Stoler 2002: 90). Artists respond to “the archive” in what Hal Foster terms an “archive impulse” towards secondary manipulation of documents and institutions (“An Archival Impulse,” 2004).

The maritime life of these sailors resembles historical ones, when ports and ships “formed an essentially male floating society” amongst “sailors, traders, and travellers as they awaited the monsoon” (Alpers 2014: 11), or the “mobile labour cultures” that linked caravan porters and dhow seamen (Sheriff 2014: 4).



Anand and Sukumaran avoided invasive interviews to mine oral testimony. They learned how migrant sailors communicate through well-known Sufi devotional songs and 1990s “filmi” songs that predate Bollywood’s alignment with Hindutva, which they embedded in “grainy” amateur videos that they shared with the outsider artists (“Listening to What Is Shared: From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf as Documentary Co-creation,” 2023). Rather than giving cameras to the sailors and instructing them to document their lives, they learned to wait for the sailors themselves to share their own videos after relationships had been developed.


Recorded at sea or ashore and paired with music, the videos were made for their families and friends, not for the artists; not for viewers at the Sharjah Biennale 11: Re:emerge, Towards a New Cultural Cartography (2013), curated by Yuko Hasegawa, where the film was first screened.

The film reminds scholars that it is not always possible or desirable for marginalized and vulnerable subjects to speak directly—or for artists and scholars to ask them to do so much. Layered over original footage shot by the sailors on their mobiles, the lyrics and music of the songs carry unarchived histories and stories, becoming “archives” themselves, though in a very different sense from official archives.

CAMP has also launched pad.ma, an annotated, open-access “archive” of state and independent documentaries.

It creates an index rather than a map of encounters along East Africa’s coasts, as I discuss in a forthcoming book with Patricia R. Zimmermann, Documentary Habitats: Transmedia Ecologies (2026). The index is composed of “Watery Stories,” “Watery Drawings,” and “Watery Archives,” which can be accessed on a website.

Exhibited in the Dangerous Liaisons section of the Architectural Biennale of Venice, curated by Lesley Lokko, the work was presented as an installation. An eight-part video, Watery Archives, is presented in two large video projections, with stories from Watery Stories audible on corded headphones when sitting below the projected images.

This presentation departs from the ways films typically include archival footage insofar as the images appear blurred, distorted, or enlarged when viewers look up at them as they listen to the stories through corded headphones that prevent them from being able to see the footage in its entirety. From a distance, the images look phantasmatic, but sitting below them, they almost become abstract movements and patterns of light and shadow. Objects no longer recognizable undo the objectifying gaze of colonial image-making.

The index is comprised of "Watery Stories," "Watery Drawings," and "Watery Archives," which can be accessed on a website. Exhibited in the Dangerous Liaisons section of the Architectural Biennale of Venice, curated by Lesley Lokko, the work was presented as an installation.


One screen shows a montage of “watery footage and coral structures,” undulating with the light on the water’s surface in black-and-white and colour film stock. Humans do not appear. At times, it seems as though the outline of a fish underwater or the silhouette of a marine mammal jumping can be seen, though it may be a trick of the eye.

Tayob describes them, like Édouard Glissant’s “aqueous time-space,” as being without beginning or end, as in Derek Walcott’s 1978 poem “The Sea is History.” Like the sea, this space holds traces of the past. Slavery—and the indentured servitude that replaced it after British abolitionism—are part of the history of global warming and pollution.

Tayob imagines that traces of the past include nutrient pollution amid garbage-patch islands and oceanic dead zones. Other screens show mostly amateur footage taken by British colonizers and now part of Manchester Metropolitan University’s North West Film Archive and the British Film Institute.



As a ship approaches a Kenyan port, the camera’s gaze looks over humans to focus only on architecture, offering insights into what captured colonizer attention. “The violence of history is present in its absence,” explains Tayob, about images of everyday life, about “what is not seen and spoken of in the footage, in cities and sites that have been disavowed as having a history and place—of the meeting place of beauty and violence at the shore of sites that were irrevocably changed and are no longer” (“Watery Archives,” 2023).


Edward W. Alpers argues about "sentimental observations" travel writing by "outsiders" Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, which evokes the "vastness and complexity" of Indian Ocean worlds, mediated by "the ties the bind him to the place from which he viewed


While art performs a different kind of work than history, these two works resonate with new frameworks used by historians, such as Fahad Ahmad Bishara’s use of logbooks of a single dhow (Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History, 2025). From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf and Index of Edges locate nuance by emphasizing subjective experiences. History has its own history of drawing upon subjective materials, as Edward W. Alpers argues about “sentimental observations” in travel writing by “outsiders” Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, which evokes the “vastness and complexity” of Indian Ocean worlds, mediated by “the ties that bind him to the place from which he viewed it” (The Indian Ocean in World History, 2014: 3–5).

More significantly, these artists develop relationships with participants rather than collecting stories like colonial archivists. They locate historical evidence that avoids endangering participants.



They also challenge the limitations of Westernized modes of archiving, documenting, and even image-making. Rather than unquestioned faith in indexical qualities of chemical photography and acoustic sound-recording, which were historically calibrated to work better in certain climates and on certain complexions, they attune themselves to gaps and intervals.

They reject assumptions based on perfectly synchronized sounds and images, which is a naturalized expectation for veracity, much like the demand for official written documents by colonial archivists. They open thinking from a dependency on recorded and allegedly objective testimonies to the affective and non-linguistic qualities of music and voice.

The work decentres companies, empires, and states as the only meaning-makers. It also re-envisions how we can visualize space by thinking historically about watery and littoral places. The poster for CAMP’s From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf registers cartography in an unconventional way by shifting its focus from land to water, thus decentring states as entities that define historical meaning.

Comparably, Tayob’s Watery Index includes a map-like image with its compass oriented west rather than north. East Africa sits below the Indian Ocean. Cape Town, Mombasa, and Port Said are major ports. Waters are marked mostly by tidal directions, which are registered as more important than territorial borders.