Chaudhuri Bari (House of the Chaudhuris) is located on the outskirts the city of Kolkata, in Baruipur in the South 24 Parganas district. Chaudhuri Bari of Baruipur is a sprawling structure set amidst extensive gardens. Possibly constructed in the latter half of the 19th century the cast iron columns and railings on the frontage, the two courtyards and the pond within the compound all speak of the wealth of the family who occupied these premises. The extensive use of traditional arches and column clusters along with western classical elements truly represent the aspirations and status of such landed families of the era. During the workshop, I was interested in the activity that we, the ‘artists’, were preoccupied with. ‘We’ were situated in a particular time period on a particular piece of property with its peculiar history, alien to most of us before this, and had the license to impose upon it our individual creative discourse. Moreover, the fact that though this was not a gallery/museum but the works were installed and exhibited there, widened the context of the projects by bringing them out of the realm of the exhibition space. Paradoxically, however, this non-exhibiting space was then transformed into an ‘open-studio’ cum gallery of ‘site­specific installations’.

This activity of ‘art-making’ informed my work at Khoj. The series of photographs, on the walls and in the album, was ostensibly a fabrication. The photographs of the couple, a fellow artist and I, were taken and printed manually in the local rural studio in attire indigenous to that area and were located firmly in the present. They appeared to belong to an era long gone. Some clues to the fact that this was indeed a lie were intentionally included, for instance the painted background of the studio wall and the confused back-dating of the photographs in the family album. The captions in the album were meant to evoke subtly the nostalgia associated with colonization, hinting at the act of the artist’s idea(s) superceding and/or appropriating the environment. Thereby, implicating me. The peculiar pattern of light and shadows, created by the bulb hanging over the slowly moving ceiling fan, and the ambience of Chaudhuri Bari itself, transposed this fabricated narrative into an equivocal truth.