How Many Seas

The Afterlife group has created eleven monumental photographs for a public exhibition facing the seashore on the Bandra Carter Road bandstand in Mumbai, India. These images, collected by individual artists in Korea, Greece, Quebec, Romania, Bosnia, Ontario, and Iceland, form an open constellation that speaks to the ambiguity of memory. English and Hindi captions trace the distance between these private moments and their new public lifes. The texts, like the images themselves, employ different modes of writing: from poetic reflection to transcribed conversations. Together they evoke a fragmentary, allegorical form of storytelling. They are like pages ripped from a monumental book: ruins of a story that we cannot reconstruct, but to which they bear mute witness. How Many Seas returns these images to gaze back at the sea. At a time marked by a shifting geopolitics of migration and survival, we understand even small aesthetic acts as forms of resistance.