Home and the World

Hybrid Film (Corridor from Ray's 'Ghare Baire', tile floor, earth floor, women moving forwards, fallen tree, Gulmohar and Banyan, owlgoat, dust, peacock, Bombay ephemera, broom, bamboo scaffolding, foil arch, tinsel, plywood), 2015

HD video, -bd-r, edition of 5

In Satyajit Rays 1984 Cinematic adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s 1916 novel Ghare Baire (‘The Home and the World”), the female protagonist passes through a corridor from domestic chambers, marking her entry into the outside world and involvement in the affairs of a nascent post-colonial India. ‘Home and the World draws parallels between the history represented in Ray’s film and the present moment. Composed around the breakdown of the colonial corridor architecture and an unexpected shift into another kind of urban, it pictures a world in motion. Despite the sense of collapse, a series of repeating female figures continue to progress forwards, marching, walking and sweeping, sometimes affecting a change in the scene. The air is filled first with floating shards of falling glass and then to the ephemera that evidences the daily practices sustaining small merchant and domestic cultures, swirling with the dust.