This book sculpture by Manish Nai doubles as an object of contemplation and a relic of Nai’s ongoing meditation on time. Nai employs natural elements like water, gravity and pressure to compress the layers of paper until they settle into distinct strata like sedimentary rock. Resting upon their covers, Nai’s book sculptures offer some access to their history as narrative objects, but their compressed form refuses access to the text. The former content is arrested in time, frozen inside the sculpture. As their conceptual identity as a source of storytelling shifts, they evolve into a purely material substance—a source of abstract rather than narrative meaning. Nai has been collecting books from secondhand stores for many years. He is attracted to them on an aesthetic level, admiring the shades of yellow, tan and brown that develop as the paper gradually ages. After experimenting with various ways of compressing the books, he arrived at the technique of soaking the novels in water for a month and then pressing them together. This process transforms the books into something that looks and feels more like cut marble than paper. Materially, Nai is compressing a material; conceptually, he is compressing words and time. These sculptures inquire, “What is a book that cannot be read, or a sculpture that can’t fully be seen?” Nai’s vision for socially-conscious minimalism has earned him global attention as a crucial voice for Indian art today. Paying mind towards the complex intersections of material culture, art history, class relations, and autobiography, his geometrically simple forms distill the essence of contemporary Mumbai. Using materials that are both modest and quintessentially Indian, like jute, teak, newspaper, vintage clothing, or in this case secondhand books, Nai’s pieces are studies in tedious complexities that, once completed, are presented as a tightly organized unit. The media that Nai uses are usually cheap and ubiquitous, alluding to both hierarchies of artistic media and Indian social structures.