“While I was able to populate the empty white cube of the gallery space with the surreal beauty of the streets through these composites, I wondered whether my engagement with the city could also simultaneously address the streets and public spaces. I was able to explore this question both individually as an artist and collaboratively as part of an art collective during my fellowship with Hamdasti, a collective located in the neighbourhood of Chitpur.”

Since 2015, it has been my privilege to engage with Chitpur in Kolkata and Chor Bazar in Mumbai in several capacities – flaneur, photographer, artist, witness and even collaborator – to create an archive of a few thousand images. I used this archive to make rich, layered, embroidered photo composites that echo the quiet but extraordinary beauty of the daily lives of the people who live and work here.

My first walk in Chor Bazar was like a stroll on a theatre set decked with old buildings, bizarre antiques and exquisite furniture strewn on cramped, lived roads. On narrower lanes, the live set had props like hanging tires and piles of automobile junk amidst endless antique car carcasses that enlivened the lived spaces. In Chitpur, beautiful and crumbling buildings were laced with dainty balconies, and decrypt walls were emboldened by lurid Jatra theatre posters.

Trawling these fascinating arenas of street theatrics over the next four years helped me build my extensive collection of photos and drawings. Initially, I remained detached but aesthetically attuned. But as time went by, what fascinated me was the poetry of the everyday in these picturesque, historic neighbourhoods.

Instead of just responding to the surreal beauty of the streets, I became aware of my role as an artist and witness to the dramatic changes that reshaped Chor Bazar due to extreme redevelopment. I began to notice the interactions among people and their environments, their work, their leisure, their children and the animals that lived with them, and the daily rhythm of their lives and its chaos and calm.

The richness of the experience of walking, witnessing, photographing and drawing the neighbourhoods is echoed in the layering of images to create complex composites. This visual complexity involves a slowing down in the way an image is made and processed. What is captured is not only visual detail but also the passage of time, recorded in the many layers of the composites. Aside from being used as embellishment or adding a rich, inky depth, the embroidery is also an important part of this slowing-down process.

The visual memory of my time spent in these neighborhoods is presented not as a set of fleeting aesthetic impressions but as a deeper emotional and psychological response.

While I was able to populate the empty white cube of the gallery space with the surreal beauty of the streets through these composites, I wondered whether my engagement with the city could also simultaneously address the streets. I was able to explore this question both individually as an artist and collaboratively as part of an art collective during my fellowship with Hamdasti, a collective located in the neighbourhood of Chitpur. It has been present in my discussions with Hamdasti's founding member Sumona Chakravarty during our preliminary walks in Chitpur, and then later while looking at my work in my studio, and eventually while collaborating on different projects for the collective. The question, simply put, is this: is it possible to blur the lines between the public and the private spaces of making and experiencing an artwork?

Hamdasti works in Chitpur to create a platform for meaningful dialogue, interaction and civic participation between artists and communities. As part of my two-year fellowship with them, I collaborated with a signage maker in Chitpur to produce a series of artworks that combined text with readymades. These were displayed and performed on the streets of Chitpur as artistic interventions in daily life.

Imbuing these objects with layers of meaning and placing them back within their contexts created curiosity and surprise, leading to unusual interactions between our collective and the audience on the streets. It gave me the unexpected ability to layer a landscape with new meaning.

With Hamdasti, I was also involved in establishing pedagogical processes that reflect the journey of our collective – starting from the locality it is situated in to ultimately opening up dialogue and discussions in other cultural centres of the city. This was done through exhibitions, presentations and discussions between the residents of Chitpur, artists and visitors.

I believe that a body of work may originate in response to specific situations in different community spaces, but it can and should enter the conversation of mainstream art with careful and thoughtful editing of work and exhibition‐making. For me, this has been a crucial part of engaging with the notion of the city as a shared space.

The beauty of this journey has been in the expansion of my detached vision as flaneur and artist to a more empathetic role as witness and collaborator.