Australian artist David Brazier’s third residency at Khoj has explored the rapid rise of gig economies in India, with a focus on quick-commerce grocery apps and the culture of instant gratification they promote. Through fieldwork and video interviews directed by the artist, the project examines how labour is organised within these systems, and how the lives of those who depend on them are shaped by their demands. Brazier’s work foregrounds the precarity of gig labour while also critiquing how urban life, ecology, and sustainability are being reconfigured through platform technologies. By centring lived experience, the work asks: what does it mean to work for, order from, or operate within these systems?

A component of the installation invites the audience to participate in one of Blinkit’s own marketing campaigns: paper boats, folded from the company’s disposable bags. Originally promoted as a playful gesture to offset packaging waste, these boats take on new meaning here. Positioned in a black-dyed water feature directly in front of the projection, they float within the same 16:9 frame as the interviews themselves.

Like the narratives onscreen, the boats are constructions—assembled by hand with intent, suspended within a system, and shaped by their materials. Their drifting forms echo both the instability of gig work and the constructed nature of ethnographic observation. As the water reflects the projected video, imperfectly and in flux, the installation points toward the fragility of representation—offering not resolution, but a meditation on mediated lives and labour.