The azadi movement in Kashmir is not just a struggle for justice, it is also a struggle of memory against forgetting. I have been collecting and archiving family photographs and investigation documents related to the victims of enforced disappearances in the Valley of Kashmir. Every photograph we make becomes a memory, a record of the past.
Through this archive, I have tried to understand the ways in which remembering becomes resistance. When it is uncertain whether a victim is alive at all, the family seeks solace in going back to these photographs and in the hope that they will come back one day. In this unending political conflict, the families’ resistance is in remembering their loved ones and in refusing to accept that they are no more.
This project is being supported by the Indian Photography Festival through their long term photography grant.
Biography
Siva Sai Jeevanantham was born in Tamil Nadu, India. He is currently a Photography Design student at National Institute of Design, India. He works primarily with still and moving images to create cognitive dissonance in human minds. His interest of enquires revolve around human conflicts. The idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ has always intrigued him, and his work refuses to conform to this binary.
His recent work ‘In the same river’ discusses the purpose of memory in resistance movement using the archive of family photographs of enforced disappearances in Indian occupied Kashmir.
Siva Sai’s work ‘Avant-garde Politics’ was exhibited as part of a group exhibition “Young Advocates” in Format Festival 2019 and was also published in PIX Photo Magazine in India. His recent work ‘Animals in love’ where he talks about the emotional dissonance in zoophiles (People who have sexual/romantic relationship with animals) was exhibited in Obscura Photo Festival in 2019, in Malaysia.