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In Ripples in the Pond, the artist undertakes a nuanced exploration of Makharda, a peripheral township on the outskirts of Kolkata, West Bengal. Situated within a landscape marked by over twenty tranquil ponds, Makharda emerges not merely as a geographic locale but as a site of complex temporal and socio-cultural convergence. Through a process-based photographic inquiry, the artist renders visible the entanglements between memory, modernity, and the slow violence of infrastructural encroachment.The project is grounded in a personal act of return, both physical and affective, evoking the fictional sensibilities of 'Malgudi Days' an Indian tv series from the 80's, which serve here not simply as nostalgic reference, but as an aesthetic framework through which to understand the semi-rural imaginary. The ponds, recurrent throughout the body of work, function symbolically and formally as reflective agents, at once literal bodies of water and metaphoric surfaces that refract the tensions between past and present, fantasy and reality, the rural and the emergent urban.This duality is further accentuated in the artist’s methodological gesture: post-journey, the photographs are subjected to an extended process of scanning, not as a means of reproduction but as a conceptual device. The scanner becomes an apparatus of mediation, standing in for the pond itself, its beam echoing the slow scan of the eye across a reflective surface. By physically manipulating the photographic prints during the scanning process, the artist introduces visual rupture, ripples, blurs, and distortions, that function as aesthetic metaphors for temporal disturbance and spatial instability.Book now available at Fw:Books
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