Bharat Sikka

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Ripples in the Pond

FW Books

2025
Other Artists:
Book contributor(s):
Edition:
1st
Edition size:
Out of Print
Prior edition(s):
Large softcover cahier
ISBN:
9789083519760
Condition: Fine

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 affactive, 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.

Bharat Sikka

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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 affactive, 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.