“How do objects “end” their “lives”? Where do they go to die? How does an object have this presence beyond the monumental, a soul that is passing through time and place? Can both history and the ahistorical be dialectics in the same image? What is the afterlife of a technological process?
Shumon Ahmed’s When dead ships travel, a show of photographic prints at Project 88, captures in its title a multitude of interpretations. These are images that speak for themselves over and over again. The “when” is when ships arrive at the burial site, Baro Aulia, a beach and shipbreaking yard north of Chittagong, Bangladesh. Of past and future, this “when” hinges life and the afterlife…”
