Untitled
Interactive Installation with touchscreens, 2005-06

Scratched onto the walls is the panoramic view of the Dal Lake, set in the heart of the capital city of Srinagar, where no street nor home has escaped violence and fear for decades now.

Kashmir straddles a cultural, political and religious fault line. The valley has witnessed much terror, pain and uncertainty, torn apart by its own history and continuous conflict between the two countries that lie at its borders – India and Pakistan, which have already fought three wars since they were separated in 1947.

The markings on the walls are of Shikaras – floating house boats which bear unusual names such as ‘Manhattan’, ‘ Bombay Dreams’, ‘Paris’ ‘White House’ and even ‘New Sydney’ as if utopia here always lie elsewhere. Paradoxically some of these are also names of key metropolises of the world, nodes of concentrated power, where terror too has struck as if in revenge.

Punctured into these walls of a room, which is inverted, in places where there would have been windows to look outside, are instead objects of fractured reality transmitting unsure data.