Remains

The work Remains is formed from the shroud-like fabric churned from the river Yamuna, during the process of the film Manthan. The clothes firstly drenched in the sewage of the sacred river, became a real cesspool: the level of contamination being revealed by the colour of the fabric in each case. The churned clothes and sediments from the river were inserted in resin and encased as sculptural works. The translucent sculptural bodies archive the toxic contamination of the river, the very poison of our contemporary society.

Remains also touches on the idea of museumization and archiving, crucial concerns of the postmodern age of literary criticism. In Galhotra’s work, the conceptual notion of residual traces of the Anthropocene or the age dominated by ruthless human activity, manifests physically as the sludge and dirty fabric sucked out from Yamuna. In the intersection of contemporary critical theory, ecology and environment, and conceptual art, the work Remains surface as an artist’s voice of dissent, as a secular icon of the times we live in.