Capsule

Prajakta Potnis's photographs have a hallucinatory form, inviting the viewer to enter a strange world that seems both real and unreal. She employs a sterile, temperature-controlled space that expands time by delaying the process of decay. Its captivating light has a sense of the familiar and is reminiscent of the inside of a mall or an airport, where you lose a sense of time and place. These “non places” as Marc Auge calls them, follow a certain kind of archetype, the inside of these sterile spaces has a compelling antiseptic character that is disconnected from the local or the outside. The anodyne and anonymous solitude of these non-places offers the transitory occupant the illusion of being part of some grand global scheme: a fugitive glimpse of a utopian city world. Escalators, a common feature in these “non-spaces”, offer the experience of being suspended in motion and in time, freezing departures and arrivals. These non spaces have homogenised the urban and the modern, removing the impure and the unnecessary.

The work was featured as part of the exhibition 'Asymmetrical Objects', curated by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta and co-curated by Himanshu Kadam. The exhibition presented the works of ten contemporary artists whose practice includes an interest in nature and science or consumption and degradation as process and product, to respond to these ideas and to explore the much-debated Age of the Anthropocene and its impact on the environment and the effects on biodiversity.