Seen at Secunderabagh | 2011

With Zuleikha Chaudhari

Performative installation with actors, video projection, sets

The starting point for Seen at Secundrabagh is a photograph taken in 1857 by the war photographer Felice Beato three months after a bloody mutiny within the British East India Company. Four men and a horse pose in front of the lens, surrounded by bones that had simply been left there. Fixing a moment in India’s colonial history, the image seems to be a faithful representation of the facts. However, knowing that the exposure of a photograph in those days took a long time, we can deduce that it is the outcome of pure and simple staging Seen at Secundrabagh questions the deception of images and lays bare the intrinsic simultaneity of past, present and future.

Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg, Brussels (2011); Festival d’Automne, Le Centquatre, Paris (2011)

Performer: Manish Chaudhari

Wiener Festwochen, Vienna Festival (2012)
Performers: Kavya Murthy and Bhagwati Prasad