This image is a still from Vivan Sundaram's video artwork, The Brief Ascension of Marian Hussain. 

Excerpt from Chaitanya Sambrani, Trash: Vivan Sundaram, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2008: 

‘The Brief Ascension of Marian Hussain draws the viewer to a quasi-fictionalised character — a slim, hairless, adolescent male body reminiscent of Donatello’s fifteenth-century visualisation of the giant-killing David. The figure of Marian Hussain becomes visible as a body asleep on a (used) yellow foam mattress atop a pile of refuse that seems to undergo a respiration, revealing sediments (including the youth’s sleeping body) partially revealed as the pile of rubbish grows, subsides and morphs into a mountain. It is a fossil, such as those that are often uncovered by geological processes of sedimentation and erosion. The figure of Marian Hussain is embodied by the 'real' Marian Hussain, a teenage rag-picker associated with the Chintan Environmental Action and Research Group whom Sundaram took on as apprentice. Marian Hussain is a code to the gallery-going viewer, as if an alternate bodily emanation, identified as abject and subaltern by its location atop a rubbish heap. A body, furthermore, that describes a theatrical awakening followed by controlled, ballet-like ascension in accordance with bourgeois expectations or aspirations of transportation, migration and transcendence. Mechanical-organic sounds accompany this transfiguration from material to ethereal, from squalid earthliness to a transcendental (future) realm that remains to be defined. […] A deep historical sadness underpins this work alongside its implication of bourgeois modernity in the creation of both its representational referents and their impermanent, fleeting and ultimately illusory attractions, like the ineffable beauty of the reified adolescent body.’

Credits: 
Set, Direction and Editing: Vivan Sundaram
Actor: Marian Hussain
Camera: Avijit Mukul Kishore
Music: Ricardo Arias
Action: Rashid Ansari 
Assistant Editor: Vikas Jaiswal

Exhibition history: ‘Destination Asia,’ Curator: Valeria Ibraeva, Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Almaty, 2007, Illustrated catalogue. ‘Chalo! India Contemporary art from India today,' Curators: Fumio Nanjo and Akiki Miki, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2008; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, 2009, Illustrated catalogue.