21 - Aman Alam - Ozymandias

Jul 6, 2026 – Oct 4, 2026

In the distortion and inevitable erosion of identity and memory, Aman Alam finds the conceptual scaffolding for his ongoing exploration of the human condition, its decay, and legacy. Ozymandias (2020–ongoing) draws its title from Percy B. Shelley’s 1818 sonnet—a reflection on the fallacy of permanence and how time can reduce even mighty empires to ruins. Situated at an intersection of artistic inquiry and scientific research, Ozymandias uses a lens-based approach—supported by sculpture, machine intelligence and private family archives—to create a multidisciplinary cartography that examines the impact of cognitive decline, and questions long-standing narratives around it. Alam was in university when his grandmother Naseem started showing the first signs of dementia. Years later, after turning 29, he returned to his hometown of Agra in India to care for her. Responding to his personal urgencies, Ozymandias started as an anchoring tool; allowing the artist to process his unspoken grief with his grandmother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Examining her unique perception of the world—amidst corrupting memories and an eroding sense of self—Alam began a larger conceptual inquiry into what it means to be known, to remember, and to forget. Blurring the lines between archival and alternate histories, Ozymandias reveals the artist’s deepest vulnerabilities, as a record of a grandson trying to find solace and heal. From the perspective of a lens positioned between the caregiver and the cognitively-ailing identity, the work offers a personal entry point into questions of shared anxieties and self-ephemerality, and a study of the architecture of memory. Alam treats the mind as a “power system”—a theme central to his wider practice—prone to hallucination, confabulation and fragmentation. By following shifts in the foreboding weight on a family as caregivers, the artist extends solidarity to those navigating cognitive decline, and to those supporting them as caregivers and witnesses; with the hope that they might find in the work a shared feeling of comfort, kinship, and reconciliation. Ananya Singhal