As Relics is a two-channel moving image installation that engages with the nineteenth-century photographic study The People of India. Using digital scans of albumen prints, the work refutes the function of the image as evidence within the colonial archive, while a voiceover recites fragments of the labels used to confine the subjects. In this systemic gaze, the photographs strip away individuality, replacing it with typographic classifications.

Commissioned by the British government following the 1857 rebellion, this repository categorised humans as "specimens" for colonial governance. Drawing on the pseudo-science of physiognomy, the state treated physical traits as evidence of moral character. This installation draws parallels between the taxonomic gaze of the archive and the modern auction ¹, where both systems reduce living subjects or art into bureaucratic and financial assets.

Utilising scale and abstraction, the work questions the authority of the image through a sustained failure of recognition. The two asynchronous loops are projected into an architectural corner, physically fracturing the visual plane. One channel enlarges the photograph until it dissolves into abstraction, while the other fragments the image to resist legibility. Accompanied by a narration of the archive's descriptive text, the channels operate in temporal tension, mirroring the instability of meaning within the colonial record.