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Untitled
DVD video projection and sound
Site Specific - on ceiling / into sink of bathtub, 2004

From the periphery, into the center, swarms descend onto rooftops of familiar architecture.

They are dressed in the increasingly visible camouflage – patterns worn by armed men dispatched into my world to guard it. (my world?your world?) however woven into an outfit of what looks like it is on the back of your priest, or perhaps my priest.

Attention. Aim. Position. Pray.
Attention. Aim. Position. Pray.
Attention. Aim. Pray. Aim. Position. Pray. Aim. Aim. Attention. Pray. Attention. Position…

The familiar architecture -
Have seen it in the West, and have seen it in imported into the East, in Mumbai.
They creep, They walk. And as they walk, they dance a bit. And Get sucked in

Get sucked in again. Into the depths of the earth - into nowhere.
More join in or do the same re-emerge?
Do they know their destiny? Is that why they descend here?

Are they invaders or are they simply returning home?

The video projection fuses into space it is shown in. At times, it has been projected on a ceiling, as if it is being sucked upwards into absence/continuance; or into the concave of a bathtub, as in the case of an old castle in Germany, where the swarms descend from the outside into the sink, into the depths, excavating history and its residue.

The architecture in the video, twists, twirls, snarls out, sucks in, would be recognized as European. But the paradox lies in that the streets which circle these structures are actually in India - in the city of Bombay where they were erected to become symbols of Western grandeur and dominance, (sometimes simply imported replicas) by the British rulers onto its then colony.

Into such lines of blurred interpretation of history and power games strung high now with polarization of cultures and civilizations, actions become game-like, dangerously repetitive. As the multitude continues, have ones gone by disappeared or others joined in or have they miraculously re-emerged?

Into this endless loop, sounds oscillate between intense suctions, through military parades where cheering become gunshots and turn into a drone of game sounds.

Shilpa Gupta