The Aftertaste

HD Video 6 min 05 sec 2017

This work takes off from my previous video The Solid Melts into Sauce (2015). It looks at the flyover that has come up after displacing the iconic banyan tree sculpture from a traffic junction in the city of Vadodara. Drawing references from Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights (1995), Carsten Holler’s interviews for his installation Test Site (2005), and quotes from the Vadodara Municipal Corporation website, the narrator takes on the role of a docent/tour guide. She takes the ‘participants’ on a tour of the flyover and its surroundings, treating it as a free standing, interactive work of art. Against the backdrop of development and displacement, the humorous, playful and absurd narrative examines/questions the revolutionary compulsions to tear down what has gone before and replace it with something new. It considers the desires concealed within concrete, disguised and sold to us as transformation and progress.