SUBMERSIONS

Submersion reimagines elemental exposure through water’s dissolving touch. Floating printed transparencies of disappeared Punjabi Sikh men in rivers once naming Punjab, Gill evokes the persistence of memory and the sanctity of mourning; an act of remembrance and resistance against erasure, echoing both trauma’s endurance and water’s transience.

In Sikh tradition, Jal Parvah or Visarjan is the ritual immersion of ashes into water after cremation, symbolizing the soul’s release from earthly existence. For over 5,000 Punjabi Sikh men abducted, tortured, disappeared, or killed in extrajudicial “encounters” by the Punjab Police and Indian state during the 1980s and early 1990s, families were denied this final rite, their remains never returned.

Anthropologist Harjant Gill returns to the cities and villages of five such men, floating their images into water as a symbolic Jal Parvah. The project remixes photographer Daesha Devón Harris’s series Just Beyond the River: A Folktale, which reimagines the identities of unknown Black Americans in discarded Victorian-era portraits. In both works, water becomes a site of liberation, remembrance, and transcendence. Gill and Harris, close friends and collaborators, continually inspire one another’s artistic and scholarly practice.

Harjant Gill