Said Adrus’s video installation speaks of historic connections between the east and the west

Very few of the early morning joggers and children meandering among trees at the picturesque Shah Jehan Mosque gardens in Woking in the south of London, were aware of the history behind the place they walked on. But this place is the focal point of Indian born British artist Said Adrus’s video installation, Lost Pavilion, which opened at the Farah Siddiqui Contemporary Art yesterday.

Projected on to the wall is a piece of old documentary footage of wounded Indian soldiers from the First World War recuperating at the Royal Pavilion, a grand structure in the south coast of England, built along Mughal architectural lines. The video, manipulated by Adrus to be set at a slow pace, shows a royal visit to the pavilion to meet with some of the over one million Indian

soldiers who served under the British during the War—a fragment of history largely forgotten. Among holy-text holding rihaads suspended from the ceiling, visuals of the arches and gardens of Shah Jehan Mosque are superimposed upon this footage to tell the tale of the burial of the dead Indian soldiers. The installation uses memory, history and landscape to raise questions that find resonance in disturbances (or ‘clash of civilisations’ as they are known now) around the world even today.

Being shown for the first time in India, Adrus is curious to see how his five-year-old work-in-progress will be received. Reviews of the show frequently speak of the melancholia and nostalgia it evokes. “But this work is more of a tribute or a memorial to my father who served in the Kenyan Army during the Second World War,” he clarifies. Adrus’s own story is one of migration, and lost and found identities. His parents left coastal Gujarat in the 1930s to settle in Kenya, later moving to Switzerland and then the UK.

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