Susanta Mandal: A Few Moments of Now and Then
© Susanta Mandal
A Routine Scrutiny:
View images from the exhibition/installation
In 2006, I was engaged to develop a body of work based on a city called ‘Delhi’. It is a city where intense checking goes on everywhere to make a shield against continuous unidentified threats; CCTV cameras constantly watch the unknown. I came to Delhi almost a decade ago. During this time (when I was making this work) I had a longish beard, which, along with my brown skin and my accent made it obvious that I was not from this very city. So the question that would often bothered others was, where am I from and what am I doing here? Though I have never been harassed, I have been questioned by the police a few times at night on my way back home. So I decided to bring in this experience to my work.
In 2006, almost every day I used to start with my camera from my residence to another corner of the city to capture images to map the city with photos. I had captured almost a thousand shots, mainly portraits of people (working class), fragmented cityscape, and textures of wall, skin, everything; and from these images I finally picked up around 70 images; put them on the wall quite rapidly. This created clusters of sorts, with different sizes of photographs. I then installed a set of moving lenses attached with contraptions in a way so that portions of photographs could be seen through them in an enlarged form.
Under every lens I used small LEDs, so where the lens moves, light moves there and the rest of the photograph becomes dark; this helped create a theatrical atmosphere in the space.
Medium: Photograph, mechanical contraptions, 2 - 5 rpm motors, lenses, LEDs and timers.