Premonition, Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2011)
Sometimes, not even the insistent repetition of phenomena finds you prepared for the uncanny tug of premonition. Premonition: the anticipatory call of things forever about to happen. Even if nothing happens. Even if the emergency lights flicker away a wasting sense of urgency.
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We the Fuel | 2011
9 framed photographs, tape residue (210 x 180 cm)
Premonition, Experimenter Gallery, Kolkata (2011).
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DÉJÀ VU AND DISTANCE & HAVE YOU FACTORED IN? | 2011
Installation with 9 acrylic frames, LED lights
Have You Factored In? – Video loop
The picture is a mirage in the desert of the now. A thing made of vapour and thirst that hangs over the horizon. A loop caught repeating itself endlessly, like a premonition that is also a memory that is also a warning that is also a moment of reflection. Like a mirror that is also smoke. Empty frames that show you nothing but déjà vu. Have you factored for Déjà vu and Distance at Baranagar?
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The Impostor in the Waiting Room
2004/ Installation with video, photography, performance, text, audio and print
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A consideration on what happens when modernity encounters its shadow. As a group of practitioners who navigate routes in and out of modernity, its past, present and future, on a daily basis in Delhi – the city where we live, and in the course of our travels elsewhere, we have come to realize that the world is densely encrusted with ‘waiting rooms’ – spaces for transients to catch their breath as they prepare for the arduous ascent to the high promontory of modernity. The image of the “waiting room” gestures towards the sense of incompleteness and elsewhereness that fills those spaces of the world about which the overriding judgment is that they are insufficiently modern – that they are merely patchy, inadequate copies of ‘somewhere else’. Such waiting rooms exist in the very heart of that ‘somewhere else’ – in New York and Los Angeles, in London and Singapore – but it is outside these islands that they have their truest extent. Most of the world, in fact, inhabits such antechambers of modernity. We know such antechambers well; we are at home in them, everywhere. Waiting Rooms everywhere are full of Impostors waiting to be auditioned, waiting to be verified, waiting to know and to see whether or not their ‘act’ passes muster, and whether they can cross the threshold and arrive on to the plane where ‘history is truly made’.
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