Survival at Sea 2024 - ongoing
Survival at Sea explores the memory of a town through its material traces. Alang, a ship-breaking town on the Gulf of Khambhat, receives vessels from all corners of the world to be dismantled and recycled. Today, it witnesses a gradual collapse, with shipyards shutting down and large numbers of people migrating elsewhere. The photographs look at the architecture of the ships—their deconstruction and the scattering of its fragments across the town. The work questions the hierarchies and politics of waste. It further builds on a found object—an instruction manual, a Korean maritime publication that had been discarded, its pages weathered and torn. It lay on the ground, open to a page of strange illustrations and instructions on how to survive if one is lost at sea. The book object took shape through juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated and absurd combinations of text and image. It creates a dialogue between the mechanical and the spontaneous, the human and the machine, structure and chaos. It speculates on survival in the face of environmental collapse and reflects on the cyclical nature of life, decay, and rebirth—woven into a fictional narrative through text, image, and found material.
