In a darkened room in Pepper House Moonis Ahmad Shah’s kinetic sculpture of a re-engineered typewriter clatters on. This autonomous machine in Almost Entirely Sisyphus types the names of persons who have disappeared in conflicts straddling different temporalities. The historical use of the typewriter as a bureaucratic tool of recording is subverted by the absence of paper, rendering the movement of its keys as abstract gestures. Yet Shah intends for an inter-referentiality between these absent persons through this very act of typing.

The theme of disappearance is a thread that runs through several of Shah’s works. All That You Make Disappear in My Fret is But Immortal (2023–ongoing), a series of prints on lightboxes, conjures sci-fi looking creatures from the detritus of explosions, demolitions and destruction.  Shah’s video installation Accidentally Miraculous Everyday From That Heaven is projected on a cube suspended in space. Using a photogrammetry technique, he stitches together two-dimensional images into three-dimensional reconstructions of people living in ‘a state of exception’.

Shah hails from the Indian state of Kashmir, where, due to its fraught history, inhabitants have to contend with internet blackouts and an oppressive military presence. ‘These works speculate the undying lives of the dead and the deceased in the occupied territories to address the contingent understanding of life and death at marginalities’. This is especially important in todays time when we are facing an unprecedented crisis, from genocide in Palestine to erasure in Sudan, and silencing in Kashmir', he says about his participation at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, adding, ‘What does it mean to live in a marginality where life is made impossible? Yet at the same time, complete erasure is also an impossibility as those erased and put to death, re-emerge as phantoms that haunt the state.’ With these works the artist heightens our awareness of the fractured times we live in and the brutal subjugation and annihilation of communities across the world.