//to take a turtle for a walk -2019-20
'to take a turtle for a walk' is a mixed-media project consisting of a video installation, a photograph, and a series of six photo books. This work examines the way structures of time are organised in the colonially significant city of Mumbai. It explores the city’s and its inhabitants’s historical struggles with homogenisation, centralisation and globalisation of time, as well as how the modern conception of time impacts the inhabitants overall pace, physiognomic behaviours, and work schedules.
I referred to the research done in 1999 by two cultural psychologists, Robert V. Levine and Ara Noranzayan. The research conducted to understand the pace of life within 31 countries around the world, and it proposes three indicators of pace of life.
First, the average speed of common people walking within the city; second is the speed at which a postal clerk completes his or her duty (speed of delivery of a message); and third, the accuracy or deviation of the public clocks of the city.
By expressing the complexity of how the passage of time and the pace of life in a city affect human psychology and how they either shape or disrupt the community characteristics of a culture, this work visually responds to these indicators of pace.
- The video installation is further divided into two sections: a text description of the data gathered from the survey done to determine the speed of common people walking at ten different locations within the city, and a panoramic video projection of a person walking over the horizon as slowly as the slowest tortoises on Earth (Galapagoes tortoise). By depicting a person moving at the speed of the slowest turtle on earth, this attempt takes the first clue about the pace of the city and challenges it.
It anthropomorphises the pace of a tortoise and proposes slowness as an alternative measure of time.
single channel video, 25 mintues long
Average speed of common people walking at ten different places in Bombay
- The image depicts an extension of the painting ‘The Portrait of Santina Negri‘ made by Italian painter Giuseppe Pelliza da Valpedo in 1889. The picture depicts a reader figure, a common motif in paintings from the nineteenth century. The woman in the painting, Santina Negri, conveyed the remembrance of the passing of her sister Antonietta, who had vanished a few weeks earlier in the late 1880s, with a veiled expression of grief and the letter in her hand.
This artwork has been staged in order to demonstrate and enlarge the mental state of reverie, which occurs when or wherever one rests in order to make meaning, take in information abstractly, or get synchronised with time, events, and things from memories.
It responds to the second indicator of pace by repeatedly replaying the event in time, which alludes to the pace of life. It changes the emphasis from the moment a message, letter, piece of news, or recollection is delivered to the extended pause in time required to fully understand a memory.
∞ , Digital print on Vinyl paper with Matt lamination and mounted on sun board, 45 x 60 Inches
By merely cataloguing the clocks, which demonstrate an overall impression of delayed or forgotten time of the city in contrast to one international time, it provides a hint at the third sign (the deviation or accuracy of public clocks).
Series of Six Batches (each 10 layers) digital prints on gateway paper, 24 x 16 Inches
