Tables of Destiny, Overturned/पलटता हुआ नक्शा
Shown at: ‘Zangezi’, Zurich Arts Weekend, Immersive Arts Space, Zurich

Video installation
Duration, 8′ 18″

At 5:27 am, five minutes less than an hour before sunrise, on the 12th of September, 1918, in the South Eastern Russian town of Astrakhan, not far from the Caspian Sea (a lake so big that it gets named a sea) the poet Vlemir Khlebnikov finished writing a passionate manifesto that he titled ‘An Indo-Russian Union’ . Here, he advocated an erasure of all frontiers and borders within Asia, and said, ‘Great Thoughts grow by the shores of Great Lakes’. A hundred and seven years later, here, in the landlocked city of Delhi, (which seems to have forgotten its one river, and where finding a horizon to look upon is always difficult) we are accustomed, especially on hot, still afternoons of early summer, to thoughts that make no claim to greatness.

Tables of Destiny, Overturned invokes a quiet resistance to grand declarations. Instead of destinies inscribed boldly on imperial tables, the work conjures slow arrivals—hesitant, flickering on modest footstools of chance. They come in twos and threes, in a quiet cavalcade of human and extra-human forms. The installation offers a meditation on time, place, and the unpredictable mathematics of being. Luminous flickers, like ghostly holograms, mark the presence of imaginary numbers, folding history into passing minutes.