Three days five nights only

This project is an abstract, encyclopedic letter to myself. A visual odyssey of awkward in-betweens, this project lingers in the tension between the real and the surreal- almost like a set of reminders I would hand over to another version of myself. The series began as a personal reaction against the elitist, exoticised approach common in pictorial representations of Asian and South Asian identities, which, in turn, fuelled an effort to unsell and decolonise an elevated practice of image-making through vernacular photography.

Here, photographs are not just an outcome of an experience that has passed by, but a frozen concentrate of individual narratives that dissect South Asian identities, performances, and sartorial representation, through characters and spaces I have grown up around. Mostly taken along the coasts of Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, and Kerala, the visuals also derive their composition from the errors that came about in the process, treading the line that separates vernacular photography from its fine art counterparts.

In essence, this project could be boiled down to being a carefully constructed pun that explores the theatricalities of the everyday. It is meant to be an outcome that visualises an organic way of seeing and inscribing the workings of the world and creating an alternate encyclopaedia of events that I have wanted, or even still wanting from spaces that photography and fashion imagery have resided in.