To wander, to stay, to dwell, to sojourn.

In the 19th-century, Lady Herringham took an excursion of budding Indian art students of Abanindranath Tagore to the Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra. As these students had not known until then that painting had existed within their cultural lineage prior to colonisation, art historian Benoy K. Behl notes that this ‘journey to Ajanta became a great pilgrimage.’

Thus. Pilgrimage is a large-scale installation work in response to Rampal’s visit to the Ajanta Caves (2BCE - 6CE) in Maharashtra, India, in January 2023. The work interrogates excavation as a dual-methodology to ‘unearth’ the past while creating ‘forms’ within the present. As research into colonial archives revealed the heavily fragmented murals of the Ajanta Caves to have experienced effacement at the hands of Western intervention, Rampal’s choice of copper as a surface seeks to unlearn the colonial impulse to preserve. As a material which not only resists transfer of Rampal’s ‘poor images’ of the murals originally shot in the caves but as a surface that oxidises over time, the copper becomes an allegory for colonial violence and resistance against capture. Additionally, the suspended acrylic screens, in-between the large copper forms, allude to both the colonial shellac applied on the original site and the lens of imperial shutter in-itself which attempts to assume a position of neutrality in Western museological practices. Ultimately, the simultaneous projections of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial extracts onto the image-forms, as a poetics of inscription and reinscription, seek to dismantle hierarchal relations demarcating form and image as the viewer finds themselves rhizomatically navigating the darkened the space, repositioning themselves as a pilgrim. A pilgrimage not from any centre or margin but from periphery to periphery.