Neerja Kothari and Samanta Batra Mehta, both work with time and mark-making as a form of recording the sensorium of being. Samanta draws from her intergenerational experience of migration to excavate the traces of arrivals and departures that become encoded into everyday life, and the senses of (un)belonging that have been handed down through history. Movement does not merely consist of bodies crossing oceans but the sensibilities, temporal rhythms and spatial interactions that carry with them lives left behind. Neerja’s experiences in physical rehabilitation and years of therapy to regain movement after a period of immobility due to a medical condition inform time drawings that count the everyday gestures that for her are deliberate, voluntary movements and a test of endurance.This immediacy of bodily pain and resistance takes over from Samanta’s inherited, intergenerational experience of loss and suffering. Samanta’s recording of the repetition of history dialogues with Neerja’s notations indicating passage of time whether morning, afternoon or night through repetitions of exercises which are restorative and depleting at the same time.

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