UNEARTH is conceived as a traveling play, where unearthing becomes a continuous, evolving project across different geographies and cultural contexts. The idea of a traveling play means material memory isn’t confined to a single moment or place. Each location and artist who joins the play contributes to a fresh dig, revealing pods of memory relevant to a specific context. Thus, material memory becomes less about a fixed past and more about a living, breathing, and reinterpreted dialogue between artists, histories and places.

The artworks on display in this showcase are an invitation to the visitor to witness the site-specific temporalities of fragmentation, loss and pain. Through installations, the showcase plays with absence and presence, to reveal materials from the hidden worlds of graveyards, ruins of homes and within genetic code. 

Syed Ali Sarvat Jafri’s lakhori bricks present the remnants of layered colonial and post-colonial histories of Faizabad (today, Ayodhya) while Ayushi Shukla demonstrates the visual politics of absence and presence, as historically witnessed by the feminine forms at the sites of Ajanta-Ellora caves and in the temples of Varanasi (India). Nad E Ali’s photo series You are the Salt of the Earth, evince The Aleph (borrowing from author Jorge Luis Borges)—a telephoto lens into the temporalities of pain, by which the resulting images travel from Lahore (Pakistan) and resonate across the borderlands. Pragya Jaiswal illustrates a daydream from the experience of migration in the urban landscape of New Delhi (India). Abdulla PA brings the play together, by holding the suspended moment between birth and disappearance.

The overall art showcase is a curatorial inquiry into five contemporary artists from South Asia and the exploration of visual materials in their creative practices. The result is this experimental multimedia display with support from the Curatorial Intensive South Asia Programme 2025 by Khoj International Artists’ Association and Goethe Institut/Max Muller Bhavan, New Delhi. 

Participating Artists:
Abdulla PA  (b. 1997)
Ayushi Shukla (b. 2002)
Nad E Ali (b. 1990)
Pragya Jaiswal (b. 1998)
Syed Ali Sarvat Jafri (b. 1984)