Remedies
Remedies, 2014
3-Channel Video Installation with Sculptural Elements
Duration: varies
Remedies is an audiovisual meditation on transformation—of materials, bodies, and time. Inspired by the pharmaceutical factory run by my family in Indore, the three-part series—Tablet, Capsule, and Syrup—translates industrial rhythms into rituals of movement and sound.
Field recordings from machines and manual labor become the score; factory choreography is reimagined by performers in long, panoramic tableaux. Each installation includes a central projection and sculptural video boxes that echo the textures and tempos of production.
What emerges is not a critique of industry from the outside, but an embodied return—a child’s memory refracted through the lens of ritual and collaboration. The factory is not vacant, but vibrant. As curator Himali Singh Soin writes:
“Saraf distinguishes between labor and work—the one associated with banality, the other with meaning—offering a view of the factory that is not devoid of storytelling... Her artistic production came to mimic the processes of the factory itself. The theatre becomes therapeutic.”
Created in collaboration with performers and production crew in India.
Performers:
Frances Cachapero
Erin Mei-Ling Stuart
Danielle Lottridge
Emeline Le Thiec
Denee Deckert
Martha Coates
Cristina Victor
Nol Simonse
Terrence Paschal
Javier Fresquez
Ramses Mariscol
Celine Parker
Spencer Pulu
Christy Funsch
Sebastian Alvarez
Credits:
Choreography: Christy Funsch & Surabhi Saraf
Director of Photography: Yoni Goldstein
Editing: Surabhi Saraf & Jeremiah Barber
Sound Recording: Siddharth Saraf
Sound Editing & Composition: Surabhi Saraf, Shane Myrbeck & Emily Shisko
Lighting Designer: Philip Matarrese
Dolly Grip: Hart Perez & Devon Perez
Production Assistant: Jonathan, Sebastian Alvarez, Diwaker Gupta
Video Box design: Dana Hemenway
Video Box production: Conrad Meyers
Custom Hardware & Software: Diwaker Gupta
Special thanks to all the workers at Wilcure Remedies.
Tablet
3-Channel Video Installation with Sculptural Elements
Duration: varies
In Tablet, repetition becomes devotion. Red and yellow pills orbit in hypnotic loops around video boxes, echoing the cycles of compression, dissolution, and reformation. The choreography builds from powder to pill, from chaos to clarity—each transformation mirroring the body’s own ritual of healing. The sound, sampled from the grinding and blending machinery, pulses like a mechanical mantra.
Capsule
3-Channel Video Installation with Sculptural Elements
Duration: varies
Capsule plays with compression—of substance, space, and self. Blue and red latex-gloved performers mirror the assembly line's geometric order, but with a quiet defiance. Their movements, though systematic, retain a softness, a subtle improvisation that returns humanity to mechanical rhythm. In this piece, labor is both playful and precise, caught between containment and release.
Syrup
3-Channel Video Installation with Sculptural Elements
Duration: varies
Syrup slips between states—fluid yet structured, viscous yet precise. Performers move through a thickened temporality, their gestures recalling both the slow pour of liquid and the cyclical repetition of breath. Metallic clangs and aqueous tones collide, dissolving the line between factory and meditation. It is a blur of remedy and routine, life-taking and life-giving.
