To return is to listen—not only to the past, but to its echo in the present. My recent project, Past Is Never Truly Gone, but Rather Lingers on in the Present, began with this impulse: to trace the soft persistence of what refuses to disappear. In the quiet corridors of our inner lives, the past is not a memory confined by time and distance, but a vibration that continues to shape the contours of the present.
While time creates strangers, time can also make one familiar
Time is a paradoxical force. It turns the familiar into a stranger, yet with a persistent gaze, the strange becomes familiar again as time stretches and folds, obscuring memory while preserving its residue. When stories, objects, and gestures are handed down across generations, only fragments endure: a photograph, a letter, an heirloom. The rest fades into the fog of forgetting. Family albums, once dense with lives and laughter, dissolve into absences; faces blur, handwriting becomes unreadable. Yet, even in their fading, these remnants insist on being seen.
The process begins with a return, a retracing of steps, an act of careful listening. What were the shapes of these objects once touched, once cherished? What meanings did they carry across the years? To engage with them now is to engage with both history and imagination; to reconstruct relationships, not to preserve the past as it was, but to recognise how it continues to evolve. This movement between recovery and reimagining is at the heart of my practice. It asks: what happens when memory becomes material, and when material becomes memory again?
My family’s history, and by extension my own, unfolds through a series of migrations that stretch across eight decades, from 1939 to 2021. The timeline begins with the Burma War during World War II, moves through the violent displacement of the Partition, and continues with the quiet endurance of life in a servant quarter in Delhi, a space that became home after 1947. Over these years, a collection of photographs, handlooms, utensils, and letters, along with accumulated ordinary objects have turned into vessels of meaning. There are old brass vessels that once held water, a ring used for stitching clothes, and documents that speak of a move from Lahore to Delhi in the wake of Partition. Among these artifacts, there are also photographs that hold moments of tenderness, shared meals, gestures of hospitality, faces frozen mid-laughter. On the verso, inscriptions in Urdu linger, faint and incomplete. The writers are unknown and the contexts have dissolved. Still, their presence exerts a quiet pull, inviting interpretation, empathy, and curiosity. In revisiting these traces, I am also revisiting the shape of my own belonging and how memory, even fractured, continues to define identity.
The archive’s story extends beyond the family home. During my conversations with my father and some former residents of our first house in Delhi after Partition, another unexpected, yet deeply familiar narrative surfaced . In 1981, a Punjabi kabadiwala (scrap dealer) arrived with a bundle of photographs. These images had travelled from Panja Sahib Gurudwara, now in Pakistan, carrying with them whispers of lives once intertwined. In the evenings, translation sessions unfolded across the neighbourhood. Neighbours gathered, leaning over the scattered photographs, as a Maulvi ji from the nearby mosque came to our home to read aloud the Urdu inscriptions, his voice carrying their Hindi translations that had weathered the long passage of time.
English Translation — Letter No. 819
Salam Chachajaan,
The girl standing in this photograph was named Bachchi.
She is your niece.
She stands with her younger daughter, Shamim Bano.
This photograph was taken two or three years after Partition.
At the time of Partition, she and her father (your brother),
along with some relatives, could not board the train with you.
Now
She has been married for a long time.
After marriage, her name was changed.
She is now known as “Ghulam Nazma.”
As soon as you receive this photograph,
Please reply to this letter as soon as possible.
We will wait for your letter.
The photographs soon became more than mere artifacts; they turned into messengers, mediators of reunion. Each letter, each face, reconnected families once severed by borders. Through these encounters, I began to understand that while geography divides, memory moves differently, softly, and insistently, refusing to conform to logical linearity . After a border is drawn, lives do not end; they shift form, continuing their search for one another across distance and silence. The Timebox installation became a way to bring these ideas into form to allow the past to shimmer within the present. Conceived as an immersive and interactive experience, each Timebox functions as a poetic portal, projecting fragments of history into contemporary space. Through light, drawing, archival photographs, and movement, the installation transforms static archives into living stories. Light, as Jorge Luis Borges often suggested, carries the potential for revelation as a way of seeing time not as linear, but labyrinthine1. Within each illuminated frame, past and present fold into one another, suggesting that time is not a sequence but a texture, something we move through, again and again.
At the heart of this process lies what I call the stranger archive, that remnant of familial memory borne too far by time to feel entirely familiar. These objects, displaced from their original context, appear distant, almost foreign. Yet in engaging with them, we become witnesses to their transformation. The viewer participates in this excavation, reconstructing meaning through slowness and attention, tracing new lines of connection across time.
The project’s visual language draws from juxtaposition: archival photographs layered with hand-drawn interventions, domestic relics paired with oral narratives. The layering of media produces a texture of time, a palimpsest where memory is not linear but circular, where presence and absence overlap. This interplay resists nostalgia, favouring instead a deeper contemplation of how histories linger. What emerges is not a recovery of the past, but an encounter with its afterimages, the ways in which memory refuses to be contained, how it seeps into the fabric of now.
In working with these archives, I realised that the act of return is not an act of repair. The archive does not close the wound but keeps it visible and alive. It offers a companionship with the unknown, and intimacy with what cannot be fully named or retrieved. To sit with the archive is to acknowledge both its silences and its insistence. It asks us to dwell with incompleteness, to listen to what has not been spoken, and to recognise that even in forgetting, something endures.
To return, then, is not to reclaim what was lost, but to inhabit what remains. It is to linger within the shimmer between memory and estrangement, between image and meaning. The past does not end, it continues refracted through light, reframed through care, reimagined through time.
1 Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, New Directions, 1964.
DETAILAS OF ARTWORK
Artist name – Vikrant Kano
Title – Past is Never Truly Gone but Rather Lingers on in the Present
Medium – Timebox, Material – Wood, brick dust, archival print of photographs from personal archive, Bonsai plant and pot Lightbox
Size – a) Gulam Nazma – 45.5 x 30.5 x 3 inches each , b) Two Friends – 48.5 x 30.5 x 3 inches each Installation size – 180 inches X 108 inches
Year – 2025
This display is a section of “Walking Past” by Saloni Jaiwal, which is a part of Signal and Drift: Curatorial Perspectives— a showcase by emerging curators under the Gallerie Splash Curatorial Fellowship.