Searching for sivagami by Hannah Modigh

When Hannah Modigh was three, her family moved to India for nearly four years. While her parents worked, a woman named Sivagami cared for Hannah and her sisters. For a period, Sivagami became entwined with the family’s daily life—present and essential, yet without any entitlement or security.

Her livelihood depended on the Modighs, even as they relied on her care. When the family returned to Sweden, Sivagami wept. As a child, Hannah assumed the tears were simply about their departure; with hindsight, they may also have expressed the uncertainty of Sivagami’s own future.

In Searching for Sivagami, Modigh returns to India three decades later in an attempt to find her. The project unfolds as both an emotional and a physical journey, guided by memory and by sensory impressions that draw her back to specific streets and places. Along the way, she seeks out women who echo Sivagami—not in likeness, but in experience: lives shaped by similar conditions, constraints, and resilience. Modigh revisits sites Sivagami might have known or crossed, including the neighbourhood where they lived and the beaches they once visited together. By photographing other women as stand-ins for Sivagami and, indirectly, for herself, she reflects on absence and grief, searching for the lingering traces of a relationship.