Antecedent Garden

I. The Book of the Seasons or the Calendar of Nature @ Khoj Studios 2010

II. Scenes from a Museum @ Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, as part of  'Something I Have Been Meaning To  Tell You’, and Asia House, London, as part of 'Step Across This Line', 2011

III. Place Unconsidered, Trilogy @ Project 88, Mumbai, 2011

 

Antecedent Garden is a 3 channel video and photo series, filmed in Calcutta, London and Simla. The videos are of an ancestral house, a 'Museum of Childhood', a tea brokers firm that went out of business, and an old rollerskating rink. The narratives overlap as do the worlds in each of these videos. These are remains of colonial antecedents - implicated, fossilised and silently slipping into a different dimension like Roland Barthes' ghost ship, it's lights no longer blinking. The stills in this installation, underscore the futility of memorialising; they speak of fragmented practices of memory and the incomplete gestures of memory objects.

        The videos and accompanying stills are possibly a rambling index of places and childhoods and their incomplete fictions.