Chemould, Vadehra and Photoink presents Six Stations of a Life Pursued which signifies a journey with periodic halts: to release pain, regain trust, behold beauty, recall horror, discard memory. Each constellation of images is different in scale and in its form of address. Through this journey, history acquires an allegorical mode even as the narrative rewinds history; we are led towards ‘thinking historically in the present’. A life premised on the terrain of history and rehearsed with activist resolve: this proposition suggests a narrative that is dynamic yet recursive in an ethically accountable way. In this composite work, Vivan introduces different types of lived encounters. The wounded body with evidence of torture; mourning bodies in the realm of shadows; body as miasma floating on a city-lake; familial bodies in the mode of a charade; and, the incarcerated body that struggles to reclaim a ‘way of being’ and represents the historical present: of a place, a nation, a territory, a people, a person. The discards at the last ‘station’ are the props constructed for the photo shoot. Concrete objects that embody wreckage and memory, whereby we may comprehend the exacting materiality of human life.
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