Mall Hiiemäe

A group show, Imagined Futures Reconstructed Pasts, on till Sunday at Bikaner House in New Delhi, features two photo works by Prajakta Potnis which were part of her exhibition When The Wind Blows, held in January by Project 88. They show staged scenarios within an old freezer—against the ice building up are everyday objects, pressure-cooker whistles in one, a lighter in another. In the photographs, the magnified scale allows a separate narrative to unfold in the viewer’s mind—an apocalyptic landscape, “of something on the verge of being blown up". When The Wind Blows was an extension of Potnis’ interest in showing the connection between the private—through the use of quotidian objects—and the political. The title of the show itself was derived from a graphic novel from the 1960s, which deals with the fear of the atom bomb. “The fear is still there, and it’s even scarier with (US president-elect) Donald Trump," says Potnis. The series was inspired by “The Kitchen Debate", a “hilarious, heated debate between (Ronald) Reagan and (Nikita) Khrushchev in front of a washing machine, at a time when the US was trying to show off their modern kitchen appliances to the Communist world. It was like watching two little boys fighting, each propagating their own ideology," says Potnis. Capitalism, the impact of war, environmental degradation, genetically modified food, loss of privacy, the works of Potnis, who did her master’s from the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai, are inherently derived from contemporary anxieties. So, if a still-life painting of a cauliflower takes on the form of a mushroom cloud, in site-specific works she developed the idea of the wall as “a membrane between the inside and outside space". From hanging threads giving the perception of cracks to keyholes drilled in walls or frills hung as skirting to give the impression of a curtain—opaque spaces appear “fragile, giving the sense of being watched".