NIGHT CRASH COLD BLOOD marked the culmination of the Inlaks 2025 Fine Art Awardees Residency with CAMP this September. It presented a series of new projects developed by the four artists during their residency in Mumbai with CAMP Studio. The works-in-progress engaged with particular scales and facets of the city - representation of violence across fictional media, finance talk, nightlife, and cold storage systems - offering distinct  approaches to observing, recording, and entering structures that shape urban life.  Together, these works approached Mumbai, highlighting hidden systems, gestures, events and histories, and the intersections of control, chance, and presence.

Biswajit’s ‘People I Saw Killed…’ played on a large projection, while his annotations and references - both text and image - appeared on an adjacent screen. When it ended, the audience had to follow the on-screen prompt: “Please turn around.” and swivel their chairs around. Vanshika’s ‘Word on the Street’ was projected between the windows on the opposite wall, with her subtitles appearing in niches between bookshelves, while tickers and other graphic elements seemed to jump out of the walls. Both works looked at the ‘real’, inside, behind, and around the virtual worlds of Bollywood and video games, and the stock market.

Viewers  then entered the cozy edit room, which was blacked out, to encounter Ritika’s Torch Bearers - a two-channel exploration of the night in the public space of the intertidal zone beyond Carter Road. The work was accompanied by paintings and photographs of her observations, which one had to view in the dark. Exiting this space from the other side, one entered the shed, where the studio’s ‘storage’ and workshop area complemented Akartha’s purpose-built refrigerator and his food database of the building’s residents - on top of which sits CAMP’s studio.

This ‘walkthrough’ culminated in a roundtable discussion on CAMP’s rooftop at sunset, with an audience comprising artists, writers, academics, and gallerists. Much like the order of our works and inquiries, the conversation zoomed in from the global to the local, from the macro to the micro, from the universal to the particular.

Thank you CAMP (Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, Zinnia Ambapardiwala, Rohan Chavan)

View photographs here.

Night Crash Cold Blood marks year 3 of the Inlaks Fine Arts Awardees Residencies with CAMP. See Crowded House(2024) and Move Stay or Disappear (2023)

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Vanshika Babbar - Word on the Street

My project, ‘Word on the Street’ began with an interest in multiple aspects of financialization as a way to understand the new developments in Capital’s advance at the level of street knowledge, word on the street, and the visceral, intensive side of the sociality that is formed around it. I originally wanted to visit the Bombay Stock Exchange, to try and grasp this abstraction that seems to nevertheless drive all our lives in myriad ways. My recording devices were a hidden pen camera and voice recorder, with which I’d hoped to record instances of financial fraud and/or capture the air of ‘hoax’ that inevitably surrounds the topic of money; making use of the pen camera’s ability to make all framed bodies look guilty as a way to understand the transgression in the social contract that underlies the free market system today. My inability to gain access inside the BSE building, however, made me shift my focus to the textures of everyday life around it; in which the ticker screen’s constant evaluation of the global body’s ‘productivity’ becomes a site of congregation for stockbrokers, traders, and other professionals dealing in various financial instruments. While eavesdropping into conversations ranging from stock price fluctuations to state regulations on speculation to Trump’s Tariffs, I was following this particular herd character of the stock market by melding into the commotion on the street; trying to convert the supposedly immaterial character of money today into the material form of a rumour or gossip.

The shakiness of the image produced by my movement through the bustling street complemented the volatility of the marketplace and helped absorb the linguistic and bodily effects of the constant state of crisis money finds itself in.

I was especially interested in phrases and truisms that become an ineluctable part of any deliberation around the topic of money; how life is treated as if it were a corporate spreadsheet parsed out into recombined parts of activity, how the equity prices present the universe of commodities as a domain unto itself; the ways in which different subject positions in the national economy- of the citizen, investor, and consumer- meet on the street; how the accumulation of financial capital proceeds as if it were free from the social entailments that gave rise to it; especially noting how the only working class person featured in the footage also refers to capitalism and class difference as mere fact. CAMP’s introduction to me towards the image of the sting operation was integral in capturing the ethos of the site; and my change in focus from the usual static image like an instance of bribery- towards the ambient ‘sound of Monday’ on the street helped convey the spirit of financialised global capitalism as a cultural sensibility associated with certain groups, classes, and professions and more of a moral style/bodily disposition than mere ideology or doctrine. CAMP’s guidance was crucial for me to fully understand and play with the media I had proposed to use, to distill and organise the local sensorium I had captured, and the minutiae of decisions that need to be made on the editor’s table. In addition to guiding us towards developing this non-alienated relation to media/everyday technology that was integral to all our projects, we also went through an intensive re-evaluation of different terminologies we acquire from the art field and their implications, and how to go beyond art school cliches and dive headfirst into our inquiries. It is with CAMP’s encouragement that I realised the potential and gravity of the image produced by a hidden camera; how adopting the otherwise contentious identity of a lurker, voyeur, or stalker can equip us to face a truth which is otherwise incomprehensibly larger than ourselves. In reflecting back on what the work could have been, I hope to move beyond my recurring problem of using irony as a mode of dealing with contradictions; and think of the topic of money in more vertical rather than horizontal terms; as the financial market itself is an organised social form complete with strong insider-outsider distinctions, membership criteria, status hierarchies - it is not just an excess of speculation that must be regulated or just a neutral expression of greed and rapaciousness of human nature that must be rationally mastered. It is a power relation. The financial systems lay out the archetype of social organisation in credit and debit, and not in exchange. My ending sentence ‘Finance has, at its root, the word end, which means the settlement of all debts’, was not only to lay out the contradiction between the etymology of the word and its present condition in which it endlessly defers the right to live in the here and now. It was also in the hope to understand as a later project, indebtedness in a much larger, existential sense, my own indebtedness to ancestors, to the community, to CAMP; and other questions that arise when we leave the world where money is neutral.

By mapping the projection of different elements like texts (truisms, subtitles) and the video in different parts of the shelves, the projected environment mimicked the effect of the BSE Building with its visual vocabulary of the spectacle- extended in the choreography between this particular work and Biswajit’s ‘People I Saw Killed In A City’ & ‘People I Killed In A City’ projected on the opposite side of the room.

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Biswajit Thakuria

Before coming to the residency, for a few months I had been collecting images of People I Have Killed in the video game GTA V. I photographed them the moment after I killed them. It was interesting for me to see how a dead body looks, what its visual aesthetic is, and how it is constructed in a fictional metadata or coding format. It was not real, but it still carried a weight of looking. When the residency was about to begin, I wanted to extend this question:  how do visuals of violence work in a fictional format? I came to Mumbai with this in my mind. Most of us don’t experience violence directly, we experience it through visual media and narratives. What happens if the violence we see is distorted, staged, controlled or manipulated? And how does it train us to see violence in a certain way? I introduced this idea and inquiry of looking at violence with CAMP, and the process of watching cinema began using the online archive  https://indiancine.ma, run by CAMP. In this archive, I started selecting individual clips from films like Bombay, Satya, Company, Raman Raghav, Gangs of Wasseypur, Dil Se, etc., where violent sequences are a core part of the film, and I began to look at what gets erased in the process of scripting and visualising violence. I was especially drawn to the anonymous deaths, where the characters don’t have an identity, they are backdrop actors, extras, fillers. At the same time, I came across the Hitman Mumbai RPG (role playing videogame), which had its own strange mix of visuals and storytelling. Ashok and I sat together to see how the game could be played with mods - short for modifications are player made changes to a video game that can alter its visuals, rules, scripts or even characters-  like bringing Non Player Characters (NPC) to the front in ways that directly echoed how Bollywood and games use extras. From there the idea came of merging the game and Bollywood films, which became ‘People I Saw Killed in a City’ & ‘People I Killed in a City’. The work tries to look at how killing is shown in fictional Bollywood movies and in a modded video game set in Mumbai, creating friction with real historical records and imagining what might exist ‘behind the scenes’. We focus on ‘extras’ and Non Player Characters (NPC), the kinds of violence they face, and how these connect back to actual events in history. In this, the city itself becomes a stage where fiction and history overlap, blur, and sometimes erase each other. Shaina helped me in finding archives and reports of the victims of gang violence and the Bombay riots of 1992–93. She taught us editing, from the most basic to the most crucial parts, and sat with us till morning to help make our films. Everyone in CAMP has been so important for us to learn, and to push ourselves to go beyond what our projects first held. For me, this whole process of looking at films, games, and working with CAMP broadened my idea of fiction. I believe this learning from the residency will reflect further in my practice. And I hope after this residency, the CAMP “keeda” also stays in me, so I can keep pushing those limits.

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Ritika Sharma

During my earlier work, I was drawn to the quiet politics of space, boundaries, and everyday gestures - how small, often unnoticed actions shape our experience of public life. I wanted to understand how unspoken rules guide the way bodies move, pause, and interact in urban environments. These simple movements slowly revealed structures of control, care, and mobility that often go unseen. I started walking along the shoreline at Carter Road, where the intertidal zone caught my attention - a space of constant change, where land becomes sea and sea becomes land and boundaries blur. What stayed with me most was the people walking with a torchlight in hand, slowly making their way toward the darkness during low tide, stepping over mudflats and rocks, as if drawn into that unstable space. It wasn’t just the place itself, but the way bodies moved toward the dark, uncertain edges of the sea, that felt alive with contradictions - public yet private, visible yet hidden, leisure yet surveillance. As my interest in bodies moving with torch lights grew, Ashok suggested reading Disenchanted Night by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a book that traces how artificial light transformed the pre-industrial 19th-century city, in terms of both surveillance and control. The book mentions the role of the torch-bearer: “The torch-bearer goes to bed very late and the next day reports everything he noticed to the police. Nothing is more effective in maintaining order and preventing various mishaps than these torches, which are carried around here and there; their sudden appearance forestalls many a nocturnal crime. At the slightest disturbance, the torch-bearers run to the watch-house and give evidence about what has happened.” This contrast between the torch-bearer’s role in earlier times and the present moment stood out to me. Today, both torchlight and public spaces remain accessible to all, yet a subtle form of control is imposed - from the promenade toward the intertidal zone. It was through this tension that carrying a torch became my way in. Torches are usually seen as tools of illumination, practical and essential. But here, they became something else. Not heroic or authoritative, but banal, clumsy objects - devices that flickered, failed, and exposed as much as they hid. Each light seemed to shift the fragile boundary between presence and absence, public and private. Walking along the promenade with Shaina helped me develop a closer understanding of life and activities in the intertidal zone. Shaina had been exploring the space herself, especially through the recently installed CCTV in her building, which faces Carter Road and offers a bird’s-eye view of the area. One of the recordings showed four men walking on a steep path of rocks after their fishing session - a quiet story of shifting activity between low tide and high tide. The men, wearing helmets, held hands carefully as they navigated their way back, while the tide rapidly filled around them. During these walks, Shaina pointed out how bodies moved and interacted in the space - from a dhobhi ghat that emerges in low tide, to the mangroves, to the flags marking boats. Her observations of daily activities during the daytime gave me new ideas on how to choreograph, frame, and understand movement in the dark. While editing, different angles - wide shots, bird’s-eye views from the CCTV, and close-ups - were layered into a two-channel video that showed parallel actions unfolding together. This structure came from Shaina’s suggestion and became central to how the work developed. To be discreet in recording people, I used my iPhone, so they wouldn’t be conscious of the camera. I wasn’t aware of the file formats or the difficulties that would arise during editing. Many files ended up unreadable, and Zinnia helped me by encoding them into compatible formats. Her technical support made it possible to shape those recordings into the final piece. The two-channel video became a spatial play of elements - bodies shifting from big screen to smaller screen, actions unfolding in wide angles and close-ups, tides falling back and filling in; time-lapses recorded from the CCTV, guided and supported by Rohan, added another layer of observation. Supported by CAMP’s resources and critical feedback, I experimented with video sequencing, sound design, and spatial installation. The final installation brought together video and drawings - not to give answers, but to share in the questioning. On site, I recorded people walking, flashlights flickering, police whistles calling people back from the tidal zone, and the slow shift of sound from city traffic to waves. Every shot asked: Why does a body move this way? What does it mean to cross from light into dark, from public into private? Over time, the process became about capturing flickers - moments where light briefly redraws the surface and creates fragile territories, only for them to dissolve again into shadow. The torch was no longer just a tool but a mediator - unstable, uncertain, imperfect.

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Akartha Halder

I made a freezing archive storage from an old shelf-cupboard that I bought locally for 200 rupees. My proposal was that almost anything can be converted into a cold storage unit. I was also interested in the history of cold storage, from cryonic preservation to farm storage, and in the idea that the fridge is no longer a special object but an environmental necessity. I could make my own freezing storage, and inside it, I wanted to store samples of locally collected perishable data, like water samples, including monsoon water mixed with soil collected in different neighbourhood conditions, preserve aspects of the built environment, including material culture that I thought were fast   Eventually, I gathered food samples from diverse households in the Alif building, where the CAMP studio is situated. Many units gave me the dishes prepared for the day, along with their recipes, that ranged from elaborately prepared food, to maggi and boiled eggs, and take-away Biryani. I presented them as an archive or stored memory of my encounters there, and also as an embodied slice of personal history and identity. Moving onwards from this iteration, I feel that these samples could potentially become takeaways, people could preserve them in their own fridges, but if the sample is not in a controlled temperature or properly frozen, given care and conservation -  they melt, and the archive is destroyed.

The project becomes a comment on museum systems and the fragility of artworks, questioning who decides what is worth preserving and whose existence endures. Much like institutional archives that create artificial environments to secure selected objects, my work reveals the contradictions within preservation itself: protection exists only within the system, and once exposed, decay inevitably takes over.

It also deals with the idea of heat exchange: how a room heats up to make a fridge cold, or how an air conditioner cools us while warming the environment. In my work, the complex mechanics of this system are exposed, the fridge parts remain visible, so the transformation of an ordinary, found object into this system is made apparent. My interest lies in this systemic quality rather than only in the symbolic nature of what’s stored inside. If a museum were to collect this work, it would have to acknowledge not just the object but the entire surrounding environment. 

These ideas connected to broader discussions of thermopolitics, cold storage, and material existence. In Bandra, for example, meat shops like Judes and Marks are still called ‘cold storages’, carrying both a social and functional meaning. The project borrows from such lived realities, where preservation is less about safeguarding permanence than about exposing value systems, fragility, and the subtle politics of memory.