I thought you might like to know what compelled me to make a photo book from some very old colour slides taken almost half a century ago in Zambia. I found these in my mother-in-law’s house totally by accident and the images have acquired a new lease of life in the photo book ‘A new life in Zambia: Early photographs by Sant Kumar Jain’. I don’t take credit for this book. Most of the photographs were taken by my father-in-law who didn’t have any formal experience or training in photography. This is why the photographs have an innocence and freshness about them.

The use of emotion and allegory in these two groundbreaking films is truly fascinating. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) pose profound questions about humanity’s ability to shape its destiny and this is at the heart of both films. Both use space travel as a medium to tell their stories.

Transience is about the ebb and flow of the epic human journey from conception, through death and beyond into the vastness of the unknown. 

This work engages by the juxtaposition of ideas and seemingly unrelated images, sequenced to create a narrative that poses questions about nature, our capabilities, vulnerabilities and temporal existence. It is shaped by ideas and art contexts within which it sits and evokes responses from puzzlement and awe to a realisation of the fragility, brevity and insignificance of life