The Procession Collection
The PROCESSION triptychs are their own diaspora, representing the movements of people in our modern world. Figures emerge, disconnected, and become groups of people bound by circumstance in a given moment. At the heart of the work are things discarded; the inaccessibility of abandoned places that someone once held dear; scattered evidence that are testimonies to what was; what is left of lives lived who now find themselves in the unfamiliar bearings of the present. PROCESSION became a global human rights installation that began at Stanford. Its permanent installations reach to Columbia’s Human Rights Institute, the Human Rights Defenders Hub in York, the UNESCO Chair for Peace and Conflict Studies at Universität Innsbruck, Human Rights Watch in San Francisco, and the FBI's Initiative to end human trafficking.
The collection is made of sand, charcoal, and torn fragments of brown paper or the pages of decayed books. My father brought old books in Urdu with him in the 20th century from Jaipur to London, then Montreal to the San Francisco Bay Area. These books did not survive intact over the many decades he kept them near. In the end, half eaten by dust mites, these fragments slipped out of those pages and found a new life upon multiple canvases. Figures come together, unplanned, in fragments from documents stepping out of time.