Bharat Sikka

Ripples in the Pond explores Makharda, a peripheral township on the outskirts of Kolkata, marked by more than twenty tranquil ponds. More than a geographic locale, Makharda emerges as a site of temporal and sociocultural convergence, caught between memory, modernity, and the slow violence of infrastructural encroachment.

Grounded in a personal act of return, the work evokes the fictional sensibilities of Malgudi Days, not as nostalgia but as an aesthetic framework for a semi-rural imaginary. The ponds recur throughout as reflective agents—literal bodies of water and metaphoric surfaces that refract the tensions between past and present, the rural and the emergent urban.

This duality extends into method. Post-journey, the photographs are scanned not for reproduction but as a conceptual act. The scanner stands in for the pond itself, its slow beam echoing the eye moving across still water. By physically manipulating the prints during scanning, the artist introduces rupture, ripples, blurs, distortions that function as metaphors for temporal disturbance and spatial instability. The result is imagery that holds two moments suspended between two worlds.