Seen at Secunderabagh unfolds as a meditation on history, image, and memory. This fifty minute work for the stage, featuring two performers unfolds against a moving projection of Felice Beato’s 1858 photograph from Lucknow—taken in the aftermath of the East India Company’s 1857 mutiny. 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.

The work, directed by Chaudhuri and shaped by texts and video interventions from Raqs Media Collective, moves between languages, disciplines, and temporal registers—blending archival fragments, science fiction, and forensic imagination. It transforms a fixed historical image into an open inquiry, where past, present, and future coexist in unstable relation.

The performance creates an extended installation in time, where two performers (non-actors) trace thought processes, annotations, and speculative connections. Through gestures, conversation, and correspondence, the piece invites viewers to question how images encode authority and how memory is reassembled. Seen at Secunderabagh offers a journey through space and time, a subtle excavation that asks the spectator not only to observe but to participate in unraveling the layers of history, illusion, and speculation embedded in the archive.