Furnishing Papers curated by Diwas Raja Kc

The Planning Commission, which promulgated five-year plans to develop the nation, has been replaced by the NITI Aayog, a body that’s always-on, continually producing data, proactive and responsive. The India Stack links the Aadhaar database, containing the retina scans and fingerprints of almost every person in the country, with various governance and private initiatives via infrastructure provided by large corporations. On social media we are continually haunted by the traces we leave of our lives in all their microinteractive detail.

This is real time, a continual present coproduced by corporations and the state. Our actions are tracked and our dispositions calculated faster than the blink of an eye. Traditional forms of dissent and spaces of difference are coming up everywhere against a heady combination of Search Engine Optimisation, algorithmic manipulation and old-fashioned coercion.

In response, Real Time Tactics proposes interventions in the active but invisible forms that undergird this temporality: the ubiquitous smartphones and mobile internet that enable both networked sociality and digital governance; the corporations and government programmes that promote these technologies; the surveillance systems they contain that generate the data for digital profiles; the presumed congruence of these profiles with the self.

Commissioned art projects, activist interventions and primary materials come together here in a range of engagements with real time. Some use the social media that form the basis for our social lives. Others are carefully planned strategies requiring technical expertise and collaboration. Yet others are representations of the networks of power and capital that create real time itself.

This exhibition is an attempt at a conversation between artistic and activist practices of infrastructure towards liberatory ends.

Aadhaar Ecosystem Map by Vidyut; ad.watch by Nayantara Ranganathan and Manuel Beltrán; Ghost Portal by Karthik KG; —Out-of-Line— by Sonam and Suvani with Agat, Kaushal, Sibdas, Jaidev and Shiv; Real Time Governance Society with tweets by Srinivas Kodali

Nayantara Ranganathan and Manuel Beltrán, ad.watch

The complexities of urban spaces let nobody experience them – their structures and their people – in the same way. Yet these places always have certain images and connotations attached to them, held by inhabitants, outsiders or anyone in between. How then do we decide upon the “truest” representation of a city? How do we condense the histories and lived realities of each street and every neighbourhood into singular names and images? What sort of personal and collective identities do such representations anchor? These are questions “Pata” wishes to explore.

The works in the exhibition focus on urban neighbourhoods and the diverse ways in which they are depicted. Ashish Dobhal’s photographs taken in and around the “urban village” of Khirki – located right opposite some of the biggest malls in Delhi – capture the complex social and physical landscape of the area. Paromita Vohra’s documentary, ‘Where’s Sandra?’, is a playful take on Bandra, its history of Catholics, and the stereotyping of women belonging to the place. Akhil Katyal turns Delhi neighbourhoods into adjectives describing his relationship with both an unnamed beloved and the capital city, when he writes, “He was as arrogant as a Chattarpur farmhouse”. Parikshit Rao’s photographs ponder upon the ‘grey’ space of Navi Mumbai neighbourhoods, their state of being somewhere between Mumbai and not-Mumbai, between urban and suburban. Lastly, Amrita Pritam’s “Mera Pata” wonders if it is possible to not let any objective markers define us and instead build an address and an identity out of one’s (dis)location.

Ashish Dobhal, Paromita Vohra, Akhil Katyal, Parikshit Rao

top: Parikshit Rao, Navi Mumbai Monochrome bottom: Paromita Vohra, Where’s Sandra?