This installation draws upon the concept of dowsing for the memory of water. The artwork becomes an instrument, akin to the sensitive forked stick or rod used by water diviners to sense the presence of water deep below the surface of the earth, an exquisitely tuned receptor enabling the viewer to read the subterranean histories and mythologies of water murmuring below the city’s crowded streets, congested rooms and ceaseless rivers of traffic. This installation, using video projection/ sound / objects in a former swimming pool/now record room in the Delhi Public Library, Chandni Chowk, draws upon the concept of dowsing for the memory of water.
A plaque at the entrance of the Delhi Public Library commemorates the inauguration of a swimming pool by a British officer in the 1900s. Past the main library sections, a small doorway opens onto a surreal sight – bulging from the wall is the large relief of a lion’s head, jaws agape, surrounded by stacks of files. The mouth of this old aqueduct, encircled by a stone font, leads to a large space with the floor sloping to the far end. Piled high with bundles of documents, files, records tied with string, this is the colonial swimming pool.
The installation’s time-based media, both visual and auditory, create an immersive experience within the pool. Adjacent to it will be the possibility of accessing pertinent data and materials using the existent virtual platform within the library, both web and DVD. The artwork probes the sedimentation of time and memory, through the colonial back to the Mughal and then the pre-Mughal, following the traces – maps, images, myths, stories, archival texts – to calibrate an imaginary geography
of water.