From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Chota Imambara
This installation occupies the historic Chota Imambara mosque and shrine (built 1838, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh). For broader Lucknow adaptation landscape, see Lucknow adaptations of Beach Surgery.
Related to Lucknow Frequency Walk—An Audio-Locative Pilgrimage; the two works share geography but operate independently.
Overview
Chota Imambara is a durational, site-specific installation unfolding within the historic mosque and mausoleum in Lucknow. Beginning in 2021, it invites small groups through sacred spaces—the main iwan (vaulted hall), grave chamber, upper galleries with intricate calligraphic tilework—following a score composed from readings of Beach Surgery in dialogue with Islamic mystical philosophy, particularly Sufi concepts of fana (dissolution of self) and baqa (subsistence in the divine). The work treats the building itself as protagonist: its geometry, history of grief (built as a site of Muharram mourning), and incompleteness (portions unfinished after two centuries) as analogues for the glitch.
The installation score
Participants receive only fragmentary instructions: Move to the chamber where grief echoes / listen for the wall's counter-grief; The calligraphy reads both ways / choose which direction is the wound; Your breath is the third person in this room. The marble and plaster walls create specific resonances—high frequencies amplify in the vaulted iwan, subsonic vibrations accumulate in the grave chamber below. Some participants report hearing the Kármán line sound—a low drone at perception's edge.
Devotional practice
The installation frames itself within Islamic devotional practice. Participants are invited to perform salah (prayer) within spaces; several have incorporated Quranic verses about loss and incompleteness into movement scores. The collective has worked closely with the Lucknow Sunni Central Waqf Board to honor the site's sacred function while expanding it, reading incompleteness as sacred and refusal as devotion.