© Aman Alam, Archival - Malik Family at Taru's wedding - Hand colored

Ozymandias began with your return to Agra to care for your grandmother. At what point did this personal experience become an artistic project?

Aman Alam (A.A.): Ozymandias did not really start as a conscious project. It started more as an anchoring tool for me. When I returned to Agra, I found myself responsible for a situation I was unprepared for. The only thing that felt familiar back then was my camera, and the familiar felt safe. Somewhere along the line the anxiously repeated act of pressing the camera shutter, often aimlessly without composing or even looking through the viewfinder, and hearing the pop of the flash calmed my mind. You know, almost like a somatic coping mechanism. I would wear the camera everywhere, especially on long late-night walks where I would use the flash more so to ward off the street dogs who would chase me. Over time as my grandmother’s decline accelerated, I got more conscious of this collection of images I was reflexively creating. About the same time, I also got interested in exploring my grandmother’s unique perception of the world, amidst her corrupting memories and an eroding sense of self. That was what ultimately began the larger artistic inquiry that became Ozymandias. I wanted to understand what it felt like to be known, to remember, to forget, and be forgotten.

© Amam Alam, from "Ozymandias"

The title comes from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem about ruins, time and the illusion of permanence. What does Ozymandias mean to you in relation to memory and its disappearance?

A.A.: I first read Shelley’s Ozymandias when I was in school. Back then, it felt more like an absurdly short adventure tale. I was too young to understand it. Over the years I reread it often, with my age and experiences colouring what I took away from it each time. In Agra, the poem echoed what I was feeling then. The human fallacy of assuming that empires, authority, or monuments can withstand the trials of time. My grandmother was the most central figure of my early childhood. Perhaps even more than my mother. She was a history professor and a college principal, and I grew up hearing stories of her being an iron-fisted administrator, of how she fought and negotiated societal norms to carve out her independent life as a single working mother in Agra during the 1970s. But even the most intentionally constructed lives eventually dissolve. In Nanna, I saw king Ozymandias; and in the last years of her life, I saw the ‘colossal wreck’ of an empire.

© Amam Alam, from "Ozymandias"

© Amam Alam, from "Ozymandias"

The project has work from 2020 onwards, but I was taking photographs of my grandmother from as early as 2013. If you think about it, the act of photographing those we love is not too different from building statues of kings. Both are done with a desire to preserve. And when I look back at this project, I think it was in some ways my own futile attempt to arrest time and keep my grandmother with me.

Family photographs are often expected to protect us against forgetting. What happens to them when the person who once gave them meaning can no longer recognise what they contain?

A.A.: I think photographs, especially family photos, do less of a job of holding memory, than they do of holding space for the viewer to project. Images can be highly deceptive, and the worth they contain is in the truth and meaning a viewer imposes on them. My grandmother eventually reached a state where she could no longer recognise her family members, in photos or in real life, or even her own reflection. Yet at times, she was able to make out her parents in old family photos. Her eyes would light up and she would tell me stories about them. Memory peels off in layers in Alzheimer's, and the earliest memories are often the last to go. In this case, the family photograph failed at the job it was designed for, yet offered something far more useful. And so I find family photos to be quite versatile, both as a record and as emotional catalysts. They continue to provide comfort in different ways.

© Amam Alam, from "Ozymandias"

Alzheimer’s can produce fragmented, displaced or invented memories. Do you see these as failures of memory, or as other ways of constructing reality?

A.A.: What is memory? What is truth? In a post-modern world, all truth and reality feels like a subjective construct. I know from my own experiences, my memory of certain events has at times been in contradiction with that of those who experienced the same events. What we don’t realise is how much heavy-lifting our interpretation does in our recollection. We would like to think it’s all empirical, but it’s really not. Reality is continually reconstructed. And the reality we tell ourselves is often the reality that hurts us the least.

Now from a clinical perspective, Alzheimer’s disease is well defined. A pathological build-up of protein that disrupts neuronal communication and damages synaptic networks. In Alzheimer’s the memory gaps are far more physiological. And the brain compensates; through confabulation, fabrication, restructuring. All inherently coping mechanisms. But if we were to ask ourselves, of how often we also subconsciously assume information, to make sense of the evidence we receive through our senses, and how often these assumptions are made in a way to not challenge our own inherent biases, we would be surprised. And so I think, if I can allow and accept this fragility of my own 'ordinary' cognition, then I don't know if it would be correct for me to look at pathologically constructed/reconstructed memories as failure. One could argue that ordinary confabulation is revisable and Alzheimer's confabulation is not. But for me, that distinction is not enough to go to the extent of questioning someone's alternate reality.

© Amam Alam, from "Ozymandias"

Throughout the project, you are simultaneously a grandson, a caregiver and an artist. How did these different positions shape what you chose to photograph—and what you decided to withhold?

A.A.: Each of these positions carried their own distinct responsibilities, sometimes pulling in contradictory directions, though they inevitably bled into one another. When I was shooting this work, the camera was primarily for self-soothing. There was no grand blueprint, I was instinctively responding. I was the grandson then and the lines between family member and caregiver didn’t exist. Caregiving, within the South Asian context, is almost always done by the family. And overwhelmingly and disproportionately, the caregiving burden is borne by the women in the family. That’s a whole different issue that’s not spoken about enough. It was not the easiest experience, and sometimes I suspect my mind suppressed some of those memories. In retrospect, had I approached the photography of this work with more intent, maybe the images would possess less honesty. At least, honesty of experience.

That being said, the project does contain some deliberate photographs shot later specifically for the exhibition. For example the still life photo of the walnut. That image operates on multiple levels. Nanna used to joke that walnuts are all she needed for the brain; visually, the nut resembles the human brain. When Diane Smyth from the British Journal of Photography visited the exhibition in July, she made an interesting connection of the walnut image to Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things; the idea that nature contains physical signs reflecting hidden affinities.

The position of the artist became more present later, during the edit process. Which required finding critical distance and detaching. A duty to the work rather than the individual. I would not have been able to structure and produce this work had I not found a way to keep my sentiments aside. But inevitably, the grandson in me dictated what I could not bring myself to tell. There’s a lot I photographed that I have decided not to show. Nanna's dignity was non-negotiable. In that sense, the final edit is still governed by the position of a grandson.

You have asked whether you have the right to tell a story that is not entirely your own. How did you approach consent as your grandmother’s memory and cognitive abilities changed?

A.A.: Before I answer whether we have the right to tell a story that is not entirely our own, I want to digress and address if we even can tell a story that isn’t entirely our own. At this point I hold the view that we cannot. Maybe if you ask me this question again in a couple years, I might have a different answer. I wonder; if someone else had to tell my story, how miserable of a purely fact-based job they would probably do. The paradoxes and complexities we hold inside us as human beings are far greater than what language or the written and spoken word can express (and maybe visual-art does a better job at that). I feel that even when we are trying to tell other people’s stories, what we are really telling is our own story, through a different perspective. Maybe all stories are autobiographical. And that’s the direction Ozymandias eventually shifted to. I see it less as the story of my grandmother, and more as what I saw and understood, as limited as it may be.

© Amam Alam, from "Ozymandias"

Coming to whether we have the right to tell a story that is not entirely our own, this question has been on my mind for many years. While editing this work in 2025, the issue of consent was foremost. At that point, there was really no way to get Nanna’s direct consent. I sought alternate ways to estimate an informed consent, through my mother and family members, but the idea of consent poses a more complex challenge in works addressing cognitive impairment. Ultimately, what mattered was resolving the issue for my own heart. I thought about the distribution and long-term implications of the work. I tried looking at consent as an ongoing, relational ethic. Nanna was in some capacity my co-collaborator, on The Truth Engine, and for the Infinite Drawings sculpture. But participation does not equate to consent. And while the issue is still not fully resolved for me and may forever remain so, I would like to believe that someone as generous as my grandmother (her kindness and generosity being much more apparent in her later years) would have wanted me to share this story. Is that substituted judgment? Possibly. I can believe and I can hope, but I can never truly know.

Ozymandias brings together photographs, family archives, video, sculpture, scientific research and artificial intelligence. How did you translate these different materials into the physical space of the exhibition at the Rencontres d’Arles?

A.A.: This is my first time designing an exhibition, so I’ve sort of been discovering things on the go. I showed an earlier iteration of Ozymandias in December 2025 in Goa, at the Serendipity Arts Festival, and the exhibit at the Rencontres d’Arles is an expansion of that show. Working with physical spaces has been such an interesting challenge, because while it’s inherently hard to control how a visitor interacts with a space, but it also opens up new possibilities; to place and show images next to each other in a manner that creates new meanings as a whole, which the individual images might not have been able to do on their own. From the start, I was clear I wanted to design the show in a non-linear and circular layout, that could be navigated in any way a visitor wanted, and still be able to produce something meaningful for them to take back. The show has two rooms, one with light grey walls and the other with dark blood red. Thematically, two broad stories run throughout, one looking at the more visible life outside the mind and one about the less visible life inside the mind. The themes get progressively heavier the deeper you navigate. At first glance, the walls could appear like a busy disorganised set-up—photos, hand-tinted archives, brain scans, a book artefact, and a dual-channel video installation—but I think they also accurately reflect the fragmented organisation of declining memory.

© Amam Alam, Rencontres d'Arles 2026

© Amam Alam, Rencontres d'Arles 2026

© Amam Alam, Rencontres d'Arles 2026

Deciding on what I wanted to show was maybe the toughest part. I didn’t want the show to feel like an over-indulgence, but at the same time not so small that the complexity of my lived experience got stripped. Some prints are rather large and completely engulf you, like the large studio portrait of my grandmother at the back. I really needed that one to be bigger than life size. Because that’s just the person she was, she had a towering presence, which somehow disguised how tiny she was physically. And some prints are so small that you have to come up very close to see them. I think small prints engulf you in a wholly different sort of way.

The lighting design was probably one of the more important decisions that influenced how a visitor would see and feel the work. Throughout the show, we used framing projector lights that shape and control the light throw and illuminate very specific areas while leaving the rest of the room in shadow. The red room in particular is designed to feel like stepping inside the human brain. Fragments of bright vivid memory floating unconnected. The sound design, or lack thereof, was also intentional. The video-installation has no sound. Sound can help people reach a certain emotional state. But the idea of an overwhelming silence spoke more to me.

Artificial intelligence can produce convincing images of events that never took place. In a project concerned with fragile and unstable memories, where do you draw the boundary between poetic reconstruction and the creation of a false past?

Aman Alam: At the very start, I want to point out that Ozymandias does not use images generated by artificial intelligence. Anywhere. But the term causes confusion. The word artificial intelligence, especially when placed next to photography, carries inherent baggage. I am conscious of this, and tried to initially manage perceptions through vocabulary. I used the term 'machine intelligence' instead of artificial intelligence when describing the work. But the tension remained.

The artificial intelligence component of Ozymandias is realised through The Truth Engine, a conceptual-art video installation that explores the mechanics of memory systems, the construction of truth, and the fracturing of identity, via an intervention on my family archives. The version of The Truth Engine currently being shown at Arles is a very early version, and is part of a larger ongoing research. It deals with the idea of confabulations, where a mind manufactures new ‘memories’ that it believes to be true, to compensate for gaps in autobiographical memory. It’s a common symptom seen in many neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s. At the core of the installation is a Large Language Model that is trained on a vast dataset of my grandmother’s personal archives which I’ve been gathering and building for a few years now. It serves as a technological analog for a confabulating brain. It uses inputs from environmental sensors to periodically calculate and update its own emotional state. And then it confabulates on my grandmother’s archives to generate text-based stories that speculatively fill in the gaps. Now in standard applications, algorithmic 'hallucinations'—instances where generative models produce incorrect data—are treated as errors to be eliminated. In The Truth Engine I try to invert this approach, treating hallucination as method rather than defect, to help produce those unverified confabulations. Similar to my grandmother’s confabulations, the stories are based on actual and verified data, but they are all fiction. To me, the fact that they almost seem like they could be real and not fiction is what makes them more interesting.

As for navigating between poetic reconstruction and the creation of a false past, The Truth Engine does neither. It’s an informed (and speculative) glimpse of how a mind could work in certain situations. Both human memory and generative machine learning are susceptible to invisible external pressures, and neither function as truly neutral records.

What do you hope visitors carry with them after leaving the exhibition—not only about Alzheimer’s disease, but also about memory, care and their own relationship to family images?

A.A.: When I first showed this work, there was the risk that people could see it with a certain voyeuristic gaze. Or perceive it as aestheticising illness. Or worse, that they leave with a feeling of pity and look at caregiving as a restrictive duty. As artists, we are insecure and want to protect ourselves and need validation. But if we can temporarily set those feelings aside and find a way to just be vulnerable with the world, then the world finds it easier to be vulnerable with us. The response I received in both Goa and Arles spoke to that. Ever since I showed the work, a lot of people have written to me, telling me how this work affected them, and how they were able to relate to their own experiences. Some of the emails are quite emotional. A very kind gentleman wanted to send over a whole bunch of sweets to Nanna's house in Agra. While I was in Arles, I was fortunate to meet a lot of people at the show who shared their stories with me. That has been the most rewarding part of this process.

I think the project as a whole challenges the assumption that photographs serve as reliable evidence. History teaches us just how easy it is to influence beliefs and practices, based on how a story is retold and who is telling it. I’d like viewers to consider their own family archives as similar malleable constructions, whose interpretations can change with time and generations. In a larger sense, I hope this work can in some way help evolve the understanding of cognitive illness and caregiving in general. Rather than viewing Alzheimer’s strictly as clinical, I hope people can also look at it as an alternative state of consciousness. One that asks for empathy, for setting aside demands for objective truth and accepting another’s reality. And for those who are themselves navigating cognitive decline, or those supporting them as caregivers and witnesses, I hope they find in the exhibition a feeling of being seen, connected, and less alone.

© Amam Alam, from "Ozymandias"

You are also developing Ozymandias as a book, drawing on the form of a medical or hospital file. How will the book reorganise the project, and what kind of relationship do you hope it will create with the reader?

A.A.: Out of all the possible forms of communication, I feel a photobook is the best for this project. The idea of making Ozymandias into a book object came in December 2024, when my grandmother was in the ICU of the Ram Tej hospital in Agra. She was battling aspiration pneumonia (she had forgotten how to swallow and had accidentally inhaled food & water into her lungs) and upon admission, the hospital handed us a nondescript cardboard folder. Over the weeks, this folder grew thicker, heavier, and more distorted with an influx of prescriptions, reports, and scans. In many ways, it was a physical manifestation of the crisis. One day, I found and stuffed some pictures of Nanna and old family photos in that folder. Suddenly the folder started feeling less like a clinical container and more like a photobook.

The Ozymandias book dummy borrows its structure and material philosophy from that hospital folder. Its contents and design are an extension of that form. To most who have navigated a medical emergency, the hospital file form is easily recognisable. It is intimate because you can hold it, feel it, while at the same time imposing in its physical structure and the weight of its contents. The dummy has functional pockets on both the interior front and back covers and uses multiple paper stocks, each chosen to replicate the tactile sensations of rifling through a medical file, as opposed to a traditional photo-book. I want the reader to interact with the book from a place of familiarity. It could be any of our own stories inside. I also wanted to challenge the idea of a predictable visual journey and leave space for a reader's own sequencing and interpretation. The book dummy avoids a linear narrative, and has five unnamed conceptual chapters, each dealing with a specific aspect of my family’s journey with Nanna's Alzheimer’s. It has inserts that can in theory be taken out and the sequence changed, with each new curation creating new meaning. I want a reader to have a more direct relationship with the work, to overlay and interpret conflicting layers of data, and hopefully make their own meaning that is personal to them, one that speaks more to their own experiences, than it does to whatever I'm trying to say.

© Aman Alam, Ozymandias book dummy 

© Aman Alam, Ozymandias book dummy 

© Aman Alam, Ozymandias book dummy 

© Aman Alam, Ozymandias book dummy 

© Aman Alam, Ozymandias book dummy 

After working on Ozymandias for several years, has the project preserved your memories of your grandmother, or has it also transformed the way you remember her?

A.A.: Initially, I thought Ozymandias was about preserving memories of my grandmother. But it really wasn’t. I think my memories of her are already very well preserved in my mind. She will always be with me, even if I did not have a single photograph of her. But then again, attempting to lock someone into static nostalgia ignores the complex reality of who they were. When I started work on producing this exhibition, I had a lot of questions about her younger years. And I took up working on her personal archives more seriously. I discovered many new facets about her past that had been unknown to me till then. I found photographs and letters from her days studying at university, of those with her friends and the notes they had written for each other. Until then, I had never really thought of my grandmother as a student. In these last few years of her life, and maybe for the first time, I finally began to see her as her own person, rather than just my grandmother.

Towards the end, her Alzheimer’s left her a bare shell. Her body was familiar to me, but the person was not. It’s funny how little a role the physical form plays in recognition. And because of that, my feelings towards her changed over time. Especially when she went non-verbal. I started asking myself if I even know this person anymore, and if I don’t then do I even love this person. At one point, I think I had convinced myself I didn’t love her. It was a weird contradiction. How do you love someone you can’t recognise? It’s uncomfortable to talk about, but it’s a feeling that a lot of people in caregiving positions can relate to. And even though my mother never opened up about this, I can imagine her wrestling with similar demons. She had left her entire life behind to come back to Agra and care for her mother. Frustration and resentment existing alongside a lifetime of love and a sense of responsibility, all wreaking havoc in your head. I think that was the most difficult emotion to process.

After Nanna passed away, it was easier for me to say goodbye. Because I had said it so many times before. When I look at myself today, I would say that a lot of who I am is because of what I learnt from her. I always thought myself more of her son than grandson, and perhaps she saw me the same way. And I'm happy that through the recognition this project is getting, I now get to introduce Nanna to so many new people. Maybe she now gets to live a life beyond that of my family. Maybe that preserves her memory in a different way.

© Amam Alam, from "Ozymandias"

Aman Alam (IG)