What is Left, What is Dead 2025 - ongoing
What Is Left, What Is Dead reflects on cycles of production, consumption, and obsolescence, questioning what it means to live amidst the ruins of progress. The project documents Alang, a coastal ship-breaking town in Gujarat, once at the forefront of India’s industrial expansion but now in steady decline. Here, ships from around the world come to die—dismantled and sold, and the rest reincarnated into the town’s architecture. It is also a story of migration, of people leaving the town, sometimes forcibly removed from their land or displaced by the closure of shipyards.
Through a mix of archival materials, photographs, found objects, and camera-less processes, the project reimagines Alang’s landscape through its material traces, adopting an almost forensic-like approach to image-making. The photographs are made using pinhole cameras constructed from discarded objects gathered on-site, turning debris into instruments of documentation. Pinhole photography has a peculiar way of erasing human traces from the frame, leaving behind a desolate, abandoned world overtaken by machines. As technology increasingly binds us in a hyperconnected global network, the pace of life accelerates relentlessly; machines, systems, and images multiply faster than we can comprehend, pushing us further away from the material realities of climate change. In this context, the work emerges as a counter-narrative—a way to slow down, to reflect, and to bear witness to what we are leaving behind. It is a call to account for the overlooked remnants of our time, and to understand how they shape both the land and our collective consciousness.









