Gigi Scaria’s installation, Elevator From The Subcontinent, is essentially a small cabin made to look like an elevator. A viewer walks into a tiny room through sliding metal doors. On the room’s three remaining walls are continuously projected images: Panoramic photographs of homes, car parks, corridors and hallways. Each image is layered above the other and revealed as the composition scrolls up or down.

It is a simple but potent illusion because as the projected images move vertically, they create a convincing sensation of being inside an elevator cabin, moving through these layered spaces. The journey begins in an underground car park, rises through the insides of homes and hallways to the rooftops of a dense urban colony, and finally descends to the subterranean car park again.

Elevator from the Subcontinent is a wonderful critique of urban stratification. It creates the near-impossible act of moving through the layers of social and economic hierarchy. To me, this is not an architectural composition but a geological journey. When you shoot upwards from a car park, it’s like moving through a kind of sediment – the social, political and historical accumulation that gives form to the spaces we live within.

As you stand inside this moving/unmoving cabin, you become part of a new logic of mapping the new architectures of our urban triumphs and catastrophes, and all the strange lives that are lived within them.

I first encountered the work in 2018 at Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur at the When is Space exhibition curated by Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty. I stumbled upon it again at the India Art Fair in February, and found it even more playful than when I had first seen it.

What has stayed with me across both experiences is the mischief in the conceit. It’s the fact that being in the cabin makes you bodily complicit in the elevator’s almost voyeuristic curiosity, as you cut through spaces that rarely open themselves up to public scrutiny. An invitation to stare into the rooms and lives of people and the peculiar combination of solid bodies inhabiting flattened architecture, it reminded me of Abir Karmakar’s paintings of walls from the houses of strangers.

Despite the simplicity of its concept and construction, I love the work for how easily it lends itself to conversations as disparate as social stratification, urbanism, geological accretion and virtual spaces.

Much of my own work is an attempt at understanding how we tell stories about deeply contested places, and whether it might be easier to negotiate such histories within the simulated seclusion of video games or similar interactive fiction.

So a work this irreverent makes me hopeful that confronting our calcified histories might be easier than we imagine.

Artist Dhruv Jani is founder of the game studio Oleomingus. He uses video games to study manifestations of colonial authority and seeks to learn if virtual places can ever become sites of repair, retrieval and reparation.

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