Burlap, ink, resin, soundscape
2025

Who shelters the citizens of nowhere, the misbegotten, bodies evaporating fast, the pariahs of human mercy? We are inhabiting a paradigm of carnage, a bloodthirsty circus with no audience, because admit it or not, each breathing human body is on the carousel, in line to face the consequences of this rerise of fascism.
In February 2025, as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportation actions, one hundred and four undocumented Indian immigrants living in the US were forcefully deported with iron shackles on their waists, hands and feet, with sub-human abuse on US military aircraft. Posting of the event on social media, US Border Patrol chief wrote that the authorities “successfully returned illegal aliens to India”. Within a week of this, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, mascot of another fascist power structure, visited the White House, staying mum on the indignity of the Indian deportees, denying them any humane rehabilitation.
This audiovisual installation is a tribute to these one hundred and four unconsoled non-voices, my fellow citizens whose bodies were shackled in iron, to leave a non-identity to enter another. In hardening burlap, a textile largely associated with storage and packaging, in resin to create a three-dimensional floating fragmented structure, the artwork questions the architectural fragility and philosophical intentionality of a “shelter”. What it means to have a shelter; what it means to have it threatened. The soundscape reinforces this sense of desolation, as sounds of iron chains on moving feet echo seamlessly through a repetitive prayer-like melody. In a political regime where a shelter contradicts its own materiality, its promise of safety, what it is to inhabit spaces where you are forever a non-person, an undocumented presence, a visible absence.