Twenty-eight-year-old Pranay Dutta reflects his anxieties on the impact of war and climate change in human lives through his work ‘Day Zero and Neti’ showcased as part of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale at the Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi.
He has used black and white imageries on video game landscapes to narrate how water would become the fuel of survival and currency of the future. The Kolkata native is the youngest artist at the fifth edition of the biennale.
The cinematic narrative created by the artist, who specialises in deconstructing elements from real life and reconfiguring them to resemble dystopian mindscapes in black and white imagery, is frightening. The chilling visions are expressed through computer generated panoramas, architectural structures, and sounds.
“Day Zero was born out of the actual Day Zero that happened in Chennai in 2019 and Cape Town in 2018- the day when there was almost no water left as the water reservoirs ran dry. Access to water was controlled and limited to the privileged. Those incidents made me think. I started envisioning the not so distant future where water-the fuel of survival-becomes the currency and the only primary form of trade that is happening,” he was quoted in a release here.
The multimedia installations are showcased in a first-person perspective-a graphical framing position employed by the video game makers to render the viewpoint of a player’s character, creating a more realistic feeling of participation. “I chose to work with computer generated imageries (CGI). I think I can build worlds more freely as it is fictional and much more speculative. I can easily translate my ideas through CGI and explore the world I am imagining instead of the world that I exist in right now,” he said.
