In this less than a minute-long video, mundane acts become an enactment. A collage of daily happenings inside a library, commentary of disparate words and a thin skin of newspaper articles with words slashed in strokes of Red floating in and out creates an unsettling set up. An otherwise familiar space becomes liminal. Thinking of the simultaneity of things happening in and around us often makes me wonder whether it is orchestrated in real time and space.

The images and the video used to create PRESENT CONTINUOUS are documentation of my project COVER-UNCOVER done in 2019 in the library at Goethe Institut, Delhi. During the lockdown due to the global pandemic in 2020, I was trying out new compositions using these. It is like making several sketches to develop a composition leading to another drawing. It also joins the dots between different aspects of my practice – whether making a drawing everyday inside the studio, intervention in public spaces or performative exercises like reading a newspaper while inquiring about a new site.

PRESENT CONTINUOUS was part of the Long Minute Exercise curated by Bronwyn Lace for The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg. It was intriguing to explore the potential of ‘a minute’ (52 seconds to be more precise). How filled a minute can be on the screen especially from 2020 onwards is another interesting inquiry that the making of this video opened up.