Title: ഇവർ
Size: 11x12 inch print
Medium: Salted Paper Print, Artist’s Hair
Year: 2020-2021


ഇവർ(Ivar - them). I began collecting photographs of women in 2008—images stumbled upon in markets, found discarded in drawers, anonymous, abandoned, and slowly fading. Bringing these forgotten faces into my home, I placed them on my walls and lived with them. Over time, they formed a quiet community around me. I prayed to them, spoke to them, and felt an unexpected resonance grow between our lives. They are the people I live with now.

 

From this gathering, I began making salted-paper portraits of these unknown women. For this work, I used black salt to coat the papers, a material culturally associated with warding off negativity and protecting what is fragile. Its presence becomes an invisible ritual of care, a protective gesture that sits beneath each image. Yet black salt also deepens the prints’ inherent impermanence: as salted images inevitably fade, the layer meant to guard them remains, quietly acknowledging the impossibility of truly holding on. Around each portrait, I stitched borders using strands of my own hair. These delicate lines bind me to them materially and emotionally. As the images vanish over time, the stitched hair persists, encircling an empty space. What remains is a living frame devoted to holding absence—a fragile testimony to memory’s slow erasure and the tenderness required to witness it.