An installation by Chhatrapati Dutta at Akar Prakar. Picture by Aranya Sen

Turning the entire space of a gallery into a work of art is no joke and Chhatrapati Dutta has worked night and day along with his team for the opening of his exhibition of installations entitled Objects, Images, Spaces, at Akar Prakar.

The six site-specific installations are being displayed in the rooms and open-to-sky space of the gallery. He calls them Bonemill Tales, after Kantakal, where Rabindra Bharati University is located. This is where Dutta used to work till recently but left when he encountered the judicial system. Dutta has tried to give this personal story a universal twist.

The same with Percy Brown’s Donkey, a take on colonisation, “donkey” being a 19th Century contraption still used in Government art college, where Dutta studied, for making sketches. Urban encroachment and the actual people, who bring about the change but don’t belong to these sites, Dolly, the cloned sheep, as a symbol of consumerism and the hybrid culture generated by globalisation, are issues that Dutta addresses through his installations.

He conceives these installations in a certain space, and although the basic design is there, “space too has its demands” and “things happen then and there”. Neither gallery nor artist can prosper on such shows, but appreciative viewers, if such shows draw any at all, give a big boost to both.

Digital cameras are fast pushing film to the brink of extinction. Equally rare is bromide on which black-and-white photographs are printed. Since colour film is more readily available and since these can be developed and printed in a jiffy, every holidaymaker and homebody opts for these. But there are exceptions.

Sanjeet Chowdhury is an ad filmmaker who collects 18th and 19th Century Indian prints, daugerrotypes plates and glass negatives and has been taking photographs with his Pentax K1000 since 1980. And black-and-white film is what he prefers, even if he has to persuade friends to get him stock from Singapore, when it can’t be found in London.

Jeet, as he is known to his friends, will display eight of his photographs at Max Mueller Bhavan from Monday to Wednesday. These were taken during his frequent trips to Mumbai and they manage to capture the fleeting moments when the secret life of cities suddenly stands revealed. A dog smiles in front of Taj Mahal hotel (picture beside), a woman in hijab passing by a man carrying a bottle is clothed in mystery, three children smile shyly at a man sprawled on a chair like a king in Chor Bazar, and a pair of round mirrors on two window sills stretches your imagination.

These are digital prints. Bromide of this dimension was not available.