PHYSICAL PROGRAMME

A covert mission of illustrations on Delhi
By Ankur Ahuja 

Preview on Tuesday, 19 April 2022 at 18:30

Delhi is not exactly a flanêur’s delight. Between the renegade cows, stray dogs and rambunctious truck drivers it can be quite difficult to marvel at the sights and sounds that Delhi offers. Romantic meandering is often reduced to dodging the Tetris like traffic. It’s way easier to hate Delhi than like it, let alone be devoted to it. The rudeness, the lack of grace, the wanton abuses flinging at you from unexpected quarters, administrative apathy, lack of empathy… the list can go on. Yet, if you start paying attention to the particulars, the minutiae of daily life, you discover a wealth of cultural representations, casually holding their own against the monochromatic uniformity that disguises as urbanization.

This exhibition is an investigation of the city, represented by its unremarkable common inhabitant in a daily transaction with the city’s seasons and moods in its public spaces. It is also a comment on the unique form of isolation that only crowded cities radiate, where strangers communicate in wordless glances- awkward, flirtatious, suspicious, threatening- while the drama of daily life plays out around us. 

Ankur Ahuja

Delhi based cinematographer, Ankur Ahuja is a self-taught artist. A visual documentarian at heart, her current work is informed by her troubled and tense relationship with Delhi and her identity as a second-generation Partition Punjabi. She has been published as a writer and artist in the Graphic Anthology ‘Neither Here Nor There: Restorying Partition’. She also helped establish the Delhi Comic Arts Festival as the Manager of the festival that brings together artists working with graphic novelists around the world together under one roof for exhibitions, talks, and interactions.

She has been part of several group shows. This is her second solo exhibition.