ミラ・レイ・サラバイ

Mila Rae Sarabhai

The photographs in this exhibition emerge from a living archive I began in my hometown of Ahmedabad, a city indelibly marked by its role in India's struggle for independence. These images are woven with materials drawn from familial and historical archives, forming a layered portrait of a place shadowed by its past.

White Windows is a series of large-scale works originally installed by veiling the windows of an institution. Printed in white ink on white fabric, the images are almost invisible, revealing themselves only when light filters through. At the heart of the series is Bite the Hand, printed on a white sari, a traditional Indian garment whose material and colour carry cultural weight.

Here, whiteness becomes both surface and symbol, speaking to mourning, erasure, and longing. As daylight shifts, the works transform. Images brighten, recede, or disappear, moving in and out of perception. They hover between presence and absence, light and shadow, each moment offering a different encounter.

Accompanying the installation is a series of small-scale etchings that extend these themes into intimate, surreal terrains. Together, the works conjure landscapes suspended between memory and imagination, evoking the enigmatic nature of archival photographs.

The photographs underpinning the project have also been gathered into a self-published artist's photobook chronicling the history of the salt tax in India. In doing so, the archive folds back onto itself, connecting the politics of salt, the symbolism of whiteness, and the lingering aftermath of empire.