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Deceiving Time: The Ambiguity of Interconnectedness; Reflecting on the Role of Human Perception in Ecological and Personal Resilience, 2022-2023

This project was undertaken during 'Hyundai Art For Hope Grant' (CSR Initiative).

This project explores the ways in which our perception of time affects our resilience in both the ecological and personal realm. I examine how interconnectedness and ambiguity are intertwined with our perception of the world, the way we interact with it, and how we ultimately shape our resilience. This project is to provide an in-depth look at how human perception shapes our understanding of the world, and how we can use this knowledge to build a more resilient and sustainable future.  Each iteration of the project – in Photography, video, Drawing or installation form – is a different way of exploring project’s core questions and finding possible relationships between the gestures, objects, materials, and meanings involved. Where interconnectedness is both depicted and experienced through materiality. Here through this project, I reflect upon the process of transience and its connection with materiality. In the process, places act like agents of recovery.Resilience is related to change. And given the rapid change happening in the environment, technology and society, such extensive use of the term reflects this need. Pain and resilience are simultaneously intertwined entities and disparate, isolated processes that are part of larger networks of relationships. But what happens when resilience which is as personal as in the larger context became a collective concern. what about the bounce forwardness which happens while going through the transformation? What kind of shape does it take? What about that truthness of landscape that is in flux?  This whole new culture of today’s hyper-tech culturally diverse creates small pockets of resilience to be grown. These points trigger, lead and stays with me throughout this project.  This project, “Deceiving Time” is a continuation and an extension of my previous project which leads me to search and research the notion of “Resilience” and the multi-layered relationship that it produces.   

This work explores memory and place through soil collected from brick bhattis during monsoon. Paper placed in wet soil gradually receives impressions—traces of time in environments overloaded with the past. What can the past mean to us? Each mark becomes a resonance of memory embedded in inhabited ground.

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Photograph

This ongoing experiment revisits archived images from various places around Suri, treating them to explore frozen time and what lies beyond temporal erosion. These images become attachments to place as functions of time—memorials to the past that bridge Ingold's divide between scientific nature and humanistic history.

Throughout summer, I mapped shadows through my studio window onto paper. This act became a residue of resilience, incorporating body and surroundings. The resulting temporal, fleeting, layered images question repetitiveness—each day's changing shadow creates a record of experienced time.

Listening to the sounds of passing vehicles on the road gradually shifts from simple observation to reflection, revealing how repeated, fleeting moments—often unnoticed—accumulate over time, deepening my awareness and shaping a subtle connection between the act of listening, perception, and my sense of place.

© Arindam Manna 2025

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