The Impressions Project (A Sunday Afternoon)

HD Video  7 min 16 sec  2014

In collaboration with Rahul Bhattacharya. This project looks at the relationship between cities and rivers. Each city stands at a different point in its place in the history of progress and identity formation. The appropriation and re- enactment of Seurat’s ‘The Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte’ enables us to examine notions of leisure and the mundane as they circulate between Kolkata and the Hooghly river. The complexity and dynamism in the river-city relationship are mirrored in Seurat’s spatial divisions and his use of multiple perspectives. Seurat’s attempts to break and then restructure spaces and perspective inform the way the work is enacted and composed. The congestion of the city and its close knit relationship with the river makes the re-enactment almost a point of initiation…slowly the city begins to take over.