Custodians of art's stories

Monica Narula of Raqs Media Collective remembers finding a "palimpsest" of "extraordinary density, and juxtapositions of many layers of lived experience" in the materials crammed into Ha's studio which the collective's members had visited in 2016. Their first impressions resonated with their experience of living in congested Delhi. "It was as if many different temporal strata were coexisting, and not serially or in succession."

Raqs responded to Ha's collection with an installation comprising a loosely-draped sofa with an LED panel at the back and a slow-whirring pedestal fan.

"It's about layers being present; under and along with more layers," Narula explained. "The piece takes a simple mark, a material trace from Ha's archive, and articulates it as a motif on a drape," she said, referring to the Tyvek patches sewn onto the sofa cover to give it a worn-out look. "The light and color of the moving image express the luminosity of what one experiences in the archive — perhaps like the way a memory 'lights up' within. This is brought to life, made to breathe, by the breeze you expect to feel from the table fan, but encounter voices speaking instead. The spoken word weave is a reading of what we encounter in our minds when we see many of the image slides of Ha's."