VIDEO
There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer any simple origin. For what is reflected it split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, or the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three
I ADORE THAT PINK.
Navy Blue of India plays like a wrong-number love story routed through continents. A phone call keeps failing to connect, while cinema doubles back on itself: Henry Mancini’s Charade theme (1963) meets its suspect twin in Shankar Jaikishan’s Gumnaam (1965). The soundtrack becomes evidence of cultural drift—familiar, borrowed, re-voiced.
Desire is the pulse. Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda—praise for the black god of seduction, dark and magnetic—hovers in the background like a devotional undertow. Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer adds another logic: attraction powered by disguise, misrecognition, the permission to want under the cover of a mistake.
Gumnaam’s ingenue Nanda tries to reach Chappelle’s Show, her looping “Hello… hello…” turning comic, then quietly aching. The footage—harvested from VHS tapes of Hindi musical numbers subtitled for guest-worker audiences in the Gulf—shows its travel scars: wavering color, softened edges, the grain of repetition. It’s a portrait of how image and sound migrate: translation as slip, longing as feedback.
Diana Vreeland’s line—“I adore that pink! It’s the navy blue of India!”—lands as the work’s thesis: misnaming not as error, but as a vivid, telling form of circulation.