The video installation addresses an indoor activity that occurs within a kitchen space. The mundane act of cooking metamorphoses into an evocative game: it ironically repeats yet changes, within the domestic routine, as though it follows a given scheme of meandering. The simple, casual and mundane act traverses into an over-life size event, over the stretch of video-time. The simple act of mixing and kneading of the dough, in the due process, ‘remind’ of mountain scapes and various body organs. In the end they metamorphose into appearances that lie between the body organs and flowers. The food ingredients (dough) acquire a wider, deviant and altering meaning, away from what it means in the general sense. Subsequently, it forms a grid of ever changing forms and meanings. The relation between the form that ‘appears’ and the meaning it ‘acquires’ is also ambiguous.

The inverted reflection of the human images in the video, synchronize with what they are preparing (the dough). It is as if the dough that they are handling is an extended part of their own bodies. The interaction between them is that of alienation (grid) and unification (meta-grid), at the same.

The viewer is strategically positioned between three videos. The sportiveness in the video teases the viewer's ambiguous position: as being in an artistic premise and in a kitchen, simultaneously. Such ‘perceptive-shifts’ between the imaginary grids in between the same visual as two things—kitchen and a video—is intended. The shifting perception of three formations, beginning afresh every five minutes, always, (as a private space of kitchen and as a public space of artistic projection) makes the audience to cross various metaphoric, empirical and perceptive grids of gender and politics. The girls themselves appear to constantly cross the 'line' between serious cooking agents and mere playful teenagers.

This work is a part of my ongoing artistic concern regarding my survey of domestic violence and unnatural deaths in the kitchens. The flowers used in the kitchen are symbolic in nature and they form an ‘allegorical homage’ to such violences.

Surekha