Stambha of the Taken and Forgotten

 

Interactive sculpture

150,000 approx empty blister packs linked together, metal structure and mesh

10 x 3 x 3 ft

Art Mumbai, Nov 2025

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Taking a pill is always accompanied by the unstated hope of achieving better health. In Hindu traditions we tie scared thread (mauli) around temple pillars and railings to achieve something similar. Temple structures are turned into silent negotiations with the divine. Our hopes and wishes are made manifest by a wordless ritual that is rooted in an ancient cosmology of feeling protected.

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Drawing upon this tradition, my work Stambha of the Taken and Forgotten evokes a square-shaped pillar (10 x 3 x 3 ft) that has had chains of approximately 150,000 empty pharmaceutical blister pockets wound around it. Stambha is the name of a cosmic column in Hindu mythology, and each chain of empty pill pockets manifests the collective rhythm of faith, both spiritual and scientific. Each consumed pill has produced an emblematic string of hopes and wishes. These empty pockets represent countless prayers for protection and by tying them on a Stambha, I have metamorphosed their material status from worthless packaging into sacred vessel.

 

The work invites viewers to engage with the embodied experience of both touching again these forgotten prayers (empty packs) and performing circumambulations (pradakshina). This offers viewers to experience the very common with the ingrained feelings of rituals. The work is a site where the spiritual and the medical, the sacred and the clinical collapse. Consequently, Stambha of the Taken and Forgotten reclaims waste as an offering, pain as a prayer, and architectural structures as tools for shared sanctity.