This immersive art show in Mumbai explores people's curiosity of peeking into rooms

Tejal Patni builds an immersive show of the bizarre mixed with a tiny bit of the mundane

You can see your neighbours scurry in and out of the drawing room and kitchen—getting their coffee while you sip yours. The chaos of their children probably getting ready for school, their dog who asks them to play fetch as they make a mad dash for the office. Artist Tejal Patni capitalizes on our shameless curiosity about others’ homes and their lives while we navigate ours. “We always look right? Even if we don’t mean to,” he remarks, when we speak to him over the phone about his new immersive show Vichitra.

Patni, primarily a fashion photographer, is changing tactics this year to try something that excites him and which he guarantees will give all of our senses a hell of a ride. The idea of peeking into homes struck when he caught himself doing it. “I was inspired by my time in Delhi where I was living in a hotel and right outside the windows was a half constructed, one-storey building that already had residents,” he says. “The walls were not fully constructed yet so you could see them sitting around, their furniture, their lives.” 

His show is a maze of eight rooms and Patni’s sensibilities as a fashion photographer seeps in through attention to detail, with love for the grandiose, with elements of performance mixed in—he hopes the resulting experience is elegantly “vichitra”. With no intention to shock or awe, Patni eases you into the gaze and you get the creeping sensation that you too may be being observed while existing within Patni’s bizarre machinations. “One of the first rooms that I thought of was a laundromat,” says the JJ School of Arts alum. “There’s a laundry machine that’s washing money, and the women dressed as attendants periodically drip in blue ink into the machine as it restarts a fresh wash cycle.”  

Patni reels us further in saying the final piece is that one of the eight rooms will be locked. “You will be able to see what is inside only when you peek through the keyhole, and I promise you it will be something you can’t forget,” he signs off. 

WHAT: Vichitra  immersive art show
WHEN: March 9 to March 12, 10.30 AM to 6.30 PM
WHERE: Snowball Studios, No.4 Mohatta Bhavan compound, Worli 

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