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After Dawn / a letter to سحر : "Sunny Always"
After Seher passed on 7th June 2021, life was never going to be the same, a reality my parents and I would never be able to fathom…and we have never been the same since.
Seher's absence has had a damaging impact on the nature of our communication as a family, as we seek answers to questions that have no answers, knocking on doors that shall never open again, as we try to grieve collectively or in solitude, its turned bitter and for most parts we’re engulfed in an inexplicable silence, leading to repentance and the burden of living with a survivor’s guilt, chastising life's purpose itself, the all consuming existential dilemma.
'Sunny Always' is a chapter in a larger body of work called "After Dawn / a letter to سحر : A never-ending goodbye". Where I intend to write to Seher, honouring her with the craft and medium she introduced me to, photography, and how she wanted me to push the envelope of effective storytelling, to communicate more meaningfully in life through this craft.
A festering anger within lead me to an act of channelising that energy in the form of symbolic destruction, of omission, of loss - i looked at the mundane every day with a density i couldn’t relate to, a part was missing forever, that translated into puncturing photographs that lacked her emotional presence, not realising that subconsciously everything that was being omitted was speaking in sparkles, ethereally filling that void, all the punctured holes collectively became her floating spirit in our every day, i couldn’t see her anymore, anywhere, i was desperate to see her in flesh, to touch her, but now her ephemerality started to be felt, but only after we consciously stopped searching for her, the toughest thing to do, was to let her go.
Her untimely demise has created a void in our unit of four - Now with one pillar missing and three shaky, the unit is incomplete and has crumbled for good.
I struggled in ways to enshrine her, i chose many inherent constitutions but nothing came close to this cathartic work in progress where the time spent in its creation became the purest form of communication with Seher, an impenetrable connect through this medium at that chosen moment, the reason the intense light of my flatbed scanner became the portal through which these abstractions were being formalised the way they did, and they remain a testament of that fleetingly intense but emotionally liberating experience, that helped me immortalise her in her final resting place, at home, within us, around us, guiding us, forever.