In Hindsightings, old photographs dissolve between absence, repetition and recall, making for a haunting and unstable experience of recollection and perspective. Mona Sultan takes found images, sourced from flea markets, online archives and antique fairs, and turns them into sites of psychic excavation: cut, enlarged, fragmented and painstakingly reassembled into compositions that hover between recognition and erasure. Faces dissolve into hazy colour fields; domestic scenes buckle under repetition; bodies appear only partially, as though surfacing from a dream half remembered. The effect is not nostalgic so much as uncanny – images that feel at once intimate and inaccessible, familiar yet perpetually slipping away.
Sultan’s practice begins with an act of obsessive collecting. “That’s how it always works for me,” she explains. “I kind of let the photos find me and then all of a sudden I’m drawn to something and I start obsessively collecting a certain type of photograph.”
With Hindsightings, she became fixated on mid-century Kodak colour photographs from the 1940s through to the 1960s, particularly those marked by the instability of early colour-processing techniques. “There was a flaw in the formula,” she notes. “In the ’40s it goes magenta, in the ’50s it goes yellow.” What captivated her was not simply the image itself, but the visible evidence of time embedded within it: the fading emulsions, fingerprints, stains and hazy chemical shifts that transformed the photograph into something almost corporeal.
These deteriorations are not treated as flaws to be corrected. Instead, Sultan amplifies them. Enlarged beyond their original scale, tiny imperfections become strangely physical: a fingerprint blooms into an abstract gesture; faded pinks and yellows spread across the surface like bruises or weather systems. Take, for example, A Sort of Twilight (2026). “When you blow it up, the first thing you see is magenta pink,” she says. “I wanted to bring that forth.” Elsewhere, speckles of dust and accidental marks acquire an unexpected intimacy, drawing attention to the photograph as a handled object rather than a transparent record of reality. “It’s this object that has seen time,” she reflects. “The photograph is showing that through the colour, the fading.”
That physicality is central to the emotional charge of the work. Sultan describes the process of working with found photographs as one of gradual intimacy: “The more I work with it, the more intimate it becomes. You start to have a relationship with this photo, even with the person or the place. You don’t know the person, you don’t know the place, but it feels like you start to know these elements.” Yet crucially, she resists any attempt at narrative completion. Once scanned and printed, the photographs are immediately cut apart. The original composition is abandoned. “I want to forget what it looks like,” she says. “I carry the feeling of what the photograph has given me, so I don’t need to see it anymore.”
Interestingly, what remains is not biography but sensation: a lingering emotional residue untethered from factual recall. Sultan speaks repeatedly of a “push and pull” within the work – a constant “swinging between clarity and ambiguity, the familiar and the unknown.” That oscillation manifests formally throughout the series. Certain works employ rigid grid structures, such as in By Exposure to Light (2026), that imply coherence while simultaneously undoing it; fragments appear as though they should align, yet never quite do. “It’s like pieces of a puzzle that just don’t work,” she explains, before correcting herself: “But they do work.” The eye instinctively searches for continuity, only to encounter repetition, gaps and subtle spatial impossibilities.
In this sense, Hindsightings occupies a compelling space between photography and abstraction. Sultan never digitally manipulates the source image beyond scanning and cropping. “I do not remove a speckle,” she insists. “I like it the way it is.” Yet through repetition, enlargement and painterly intervention, the photographs begin to disintegrate from within. At times, washes of colour obscure the image entirely, recalling the overpainted photographs of Gerhard Richter, whose influence Sultan openly acknowledges. Elsewhere, the spectral traces of figures evoke the haunted self-effacements of Francesca Woodman. Sultan’s interventions, however, remain notably restrained. The works rarely announce themselves dramatically; rather, they destabilise slowly, almost imperceptibly.
That subtle instability is tied closely to Sultan’s engagement with absurdism, particularly the writings of Albert Camus. During her MA, Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus became a conceptual touchstone for understanding her own practice. The unknowability of the found photograph – who took it, why it was framed in a particular way, what existed beyond the edge of the image – becomes not a problem to solve but a condition to inhabit. “You can never know,” she says. “And you need to just be okay with it.” Sultan rejects the archival impulse towards categorisation and factual recovery outright: “I’m not interested in the who. I don’t want to put it in a category.”
Instead, the photograph becomes an open system, suspended within an endless cycle of loss and rediscovery. Sultan describes found photographs as existing in “a constant state of lost and found”, moving from cherished possession to discarded object before being recovered once more. Her role is not to restore meaning but to extend that cycle. “Here I am finding it again and giving it a new cycle of life,” she says. In doing so, the work quietly undermines photography’s longstanding claim to fixity and truth. Representation, for Sultan, remains fundamentally unreliable. “What is it that we’re seeing?” she asks. “It’s always changing.”
There is also something deeply personal embedded within this instability. Sultan recalls returning home last year and watching old family videos alongside her brother – an experience that left her confronting the strange dissonance of recognising herself while simultaneously feeling estranged from that past self. “It was familiar, but I didn’t recognise myself as well,” she explains. “There was this odd feeling of familiarity and strangeness.” That emotional contradiction quietly permeates Hindsightings. Memory emerges not as retrieval but as fragmentation: incomplete, shifting and perpetually mediated through feeling.
Perhaps what gives the works their lingering power is precisely this refusal of closure. Sultan speaks of wanting the final compositions to feel “just enough”, maintaining a delicate balance between revelation and withdrawal. “There’s something always unreachable,” she says. Even the titles resist resolution, functioning less as explanations than as openings, like fragments of language that gesture towards meaning without fully arriving there.
What Hindsightings ultimately offers is not certainty but suspension: images held in a continual state of becoming. Sultan leaves viewers within that instability, allowing the works to shift and re-form long after one has looked away. Like memory itself, they remain unfinished – elusive, disobedient and haunting.
