In the Eye of a Dream (2024 onwards)
In the Eye of a Dream is an immersive installation built from fragments, voices, and dreamscapes drawn from the colonial archive held at the Royal Anthropological Institute.
At the centre is the work of Charles Gabriel Seligman (1873–1940), a leading anthropologist at the London School of Economics. In the early 20th century, as rebellions shook the empire, anthropology became indispensable to colonial governance. It offered categories for classifying colonized populations—kinship, religion, psychology—that could be mobilised to manage labour, regulate land, and suppress dissent. Convinced that unconscious life could reveal otherwise hidden truths, Seligman gathered hundreds of dreams from colonial subjects across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. His hope was that psychoanalytic interpretation could produce a kind of psychic map of empire.
The project faltered. Instead of yielding a map of empire, the archive disclosed its limits: dreams that unsettled colonial categories, exposed resistance, and carried ancestral epistemologies beyond translation. What remains are fragmented, unpublished records of dreams stripped of their force as omens, reduced to data.
The installation dwells in this residue. It consists of two interactive chapters navigated through embroidered punch-card controllers, and a film, all set within a bespoke soundscape created with classical Indian musicians and custom instruments that mimic forests, rain, and bells. Through sound, film, and embodied interaction, it animates dreams that expose the failure of anthropology’s imperial project, revealing how empire confronted what it could neither categorise nor contain.
The Jacquard loom, invented in France in 1804 by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, was the first weaving machine to use a system of punch cards to control patterns in fabric. Each hole or absence of a hole functioned like a binary command, allowing complex designs to be replicated with precision. This mechanisation marked a turning point: it reduced weaving from an embodied, relational craft into a programmable system, and its logic directly influenced later developments in computing, from Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine to Ada Lovelace’s writings on algorithms.
In the installation, Jacquard punch cards return in altered form as custom controllers, painted and embroidered with symbols and systems that translate touch into function within virtual worlds. They operate as archival storytelling instruments: tactile, touch-sensitive devices that bind narrative to material form.
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