Pranay Dutta
Lives and works between New Delhi and Calcutta
Day Zero (2022)
Neti (2022)
Curated by Shubigi Rao
Pranay Dutta’s practice deconstructs and reassembles elements from reality to create dystopian mindscapes in signature black-and-white imagery. Through computer-generated panoramas and architectural structures, the artist creates chilling visions that are not only possible in real life but also forewarned by antiwar and climate activists.
In the video Day Zero, Dutta builds a cinematic narrative that begins with a drying riverbed. Slick, black, oil-like water ripples around monumental structures and monolithic silos. The video ends with an endlessly rippling digital mass. Water is the only suggestion of life in these dark, barren, desolate landscapes and industrial holdings. The movement and pace slow down in Neti, yet the intensity of foreboding increases, with shots of drowning huts and abandoned houseboats conveying a sense of movement - stirring elements in the frame, flicking the black plastic sheet - and bringing with it a deep uneasiness. The floating talisman at the end is a reminder of the life that may have been.
Dutta’s videos are made using the first-person perspective - a graphical framing position employed by video game makers to render the viewpoint of a player’s character, creating a more realistic feeling of participation. Hugely popular in combat games, the perspective is also commonly used in world-building games. Dutta’s videos recreate these kinds of environments, as the viewer finds themselves in the midst of an engineered post-apocalyptic hell.
Dutta’s acrylic-on-photograph works act as documentation of these sterile worlds. Large images present super-constructions built into dams, stone towers and rocky valleys. Plumes of mushroom smoke and a lack of humans and animals imply that this is the after, and that the world continues even when dead.
Dutta's artwork is currently displayed at Coir Godown, Aspinwall House
Until 10th April 2023
Video Lab Support- Kiran Nadar Museum of Art