//Time Flickers - 2025
Months of engagements and conversations led to an exhibition and lecture performance titled "Time Flickers" at CAMP Studio, Chium Village, Mumbai, on April 26, 2025.
The exhibition explores the interplay between time and history. Through an artistic inquiry, the works critically examine modern time, and its aspirations within a universal concept of history.
The exhibition questions how our fundamental experience of time and its social organisation have become abstract in the modern world, amid ambitions for the universalisation and standardisation of time. In addition to deconstructing the linear progression of universal history and its notion of instantaneous temporality, "Time Flickers" presents narratives that fuse the human horizon with non-human perspectives. In the slow movement of a turtle and the gradual growth of a cactus, the exhibition offers a para-modern interpretation of time, challenging the common tendency to reduce time to mere measurement.
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| Display ground plan |
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| Installation view of "Myopic owl" |
Installation view of "Myopic owl"
The image, titled 'The Myopic Owl', responds to a particular phrase that was most famously invoked by Hegel: 'The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.’ Hegel argues that historical knowledge is only possible with mature consciousness. With this, he conceptualised a narrative of world history from the vantage point of Europe, establishing it as the center and the culmination of history that is constituted and defined over the "cultures without history". The image responds critically to Hegel’s vision of history; its philosophy and its universality, by showing a short-sighted image of a dusk landscape.
Installation view of "The periphery of Time"
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Installation view of "The periphery of Time"
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| Installation view of "The periphery of Time" |
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Installation view of "The periphery of Time" The drawings represent the periphery of significant historical events ranging from the death of Socrates to the fall of the Berlin Wall via the Renaissance, which, according to common understanding, has altered the course of history. In order to redirect the vision from the center to the periphery, I have redrawn the peripheral sections of the paintings, prints, and photographs that depict these events. I have sourced the images from paintings like:The Death of Socrates by Jacques Louis David (1787), Arnolfo shows the plan to enlarge Florence by Giorgio Vasari (1563/1565), and photographs like After Lenin Speech by Grigory Petrovich Goldstein (1920), The Fall of the Berlin Wall by Mark Power (1989), and others. |
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| Installation view of "The Almighty Hit" |
The single channel video work was produced in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It represents the country’s colonial history and it attempts an indexical mapping of a region’s tumultuous relationship with sugar production. It documents the daily routine formed around a house old object, sugar bowl. As a coastal city with a high humidity levels, Colombo houses a warm, damp environment, ideal for a thriving ant population. The work follows the transformation of a still, house-old object- the sugar bowl - into a phenomenon, where the bowl is activated, almost performatively, to solve a recurring problem of preventing ants from getting into the sugar.
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Installation view of "to take a turtle for a walk" This video installation depicts a panoramic video projection of a person walking over the horizon as slowly as the slowest tortoises on Earth (Galapagoes tortoise). |
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| Installation view of "Joules per blue" and "Solar Anus" |
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| Installation view of "Joules per blue" |
The workers of the glass factory use a frame made of cobalt-tinted blue glass to see clearly into the hot ovens and machinery while the material is being processed. I placed the same glass in front of the camera as a lens to capture the factory and its workers in heat and labour.
This installation explores the relationship between heat and labour.The translucency of the cobalt glass serves to both delimit the reality of the workers as it obscures the image and, at the same time, expose a hidden reality that is otherwise kept hidden in the context of the capitalist system. As joules are a unit of measurement for heat, this attempt tries to measure the labour of the workers in a qualitative aspect, i.e., heat through the tints of blue.
This project includes a photomontage depicting an image of the sun captured by NASA in 2019. With this, the work comments on the nature of commodities in the modern world as pure surplus. Georges Bataille refers to the endless prodigality or excess that humans indulge in the trade of energies. Human actions in history are attempts to reciprocate
The infinite energy of the sun. The sun for Bataille is the prime and infinite surplus; it is the centre of all energies, and to repay the burden is the fundamental existential problem. Modernity, with its progress and surplus, is an attempt to reduce this sun’s gift, the accursed share.
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| Installation view of "Immutable Instant" |
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| Installation view of "Immutable Instant" |
Following Agamben's call to examine the relationship between time along with history, I analysed the various conceptions of time that have accompanied the trajectory of "universal history" and have shaped it. This work elucidates the complex progressions of history—from Greek civilisation to the fall of the Berlin Wall—and argues that these developments have led to an abstract concept of time, resulting in a sense of alienation in both social and personal lives.
The video's key element is a flickering pattern, which it uses to visualise historical concepts of time. This pattern is demonstrated through a dot that flickers in a specific rhythm and pattern over time, creating a structured chronological sequence of the historical periods. Through its minimalistic and formal depiction, the work intensifies the abstraction and highlights the effects of historical progression on our experience of time.
This video accompanies as series of videos to capture historical patterns of time in the flickering lights around me, whether on roads, university campuses, or at friends' houses.
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Installation view of "The Cactus Lover" "The cactus lover" is mixed media project that includes fifteen days long double channel video and two graphite drawings. The work foregrounds a fifteen-day video display of a cactus plant that grows at the slowest rate of any plant. It engages with the ideas of temporality, perceptual stagnancy and boredom, and responds to the high-paced and time thrifting nature of modern societies. |
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| Lecture performance at CAMP studio's Terrace |
Lecture performance at CAMP studio's Terrace
The project features a lecture performance performed twice. First on February 9th, 2025, at Max Muller Bhavan in Delhi as a part of First draft pop-up show #4 and second on April 26, 2025 at an open studio “Time flickers” CAMP studio, Mumbai . During this performance, I presented a text that thoroughly explored the various conceptions of time that have emerged across the historical periods, from Greek civilization to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Additionally, the video accompanied the lecture, displaying flickering dot patterns that represent each stage in this timeline.
Photos from the event
Image courtesy of Shaina Anand (Filmmaker and artist, and a co-initiator of CAMP) and Swati Kumari (Artist)