This work revolves around my grandfather’s ("ata") 16mm film roll. It was made in Soviet Kazakhstan around the 1960s. The film was never processed, never seen,its images suspended in a state of potentiality for over 50 years. In this project, I enact the rediscovery and reactivation of that material through a process of scanning, digitising, and projecting the long-unseen footage.

More than just restoration, this work is an excavation of image, memory, gaze, and medium. The act of projection becomes a performance of witnessing. Filmed reflections from digital screens and analogue projections trace the ghostly interplay of light, time, and decay. As the reel unwinds, so too does a meditation on heritage and authorship, what it means to inherit a document made in another time, by another hand, yet now seen through my own.

The project is also a study of the archive as both presence and absence. The compulsion to document a "vanishing" culture becomes, decades later, the need to rescue vanishing formats from technological obsolescence. What does it mean to see something that hasn’t been seen or wasn’t meant to be seen because of a failed process, neglect, or dismissal?