At the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi, ‘A Voyage To Permanence’, curated by art historian and critic Johny ML and presented by gallerist and art consultant Jooby Yohannan, brought together, for the very first time, three films by self-taught experimental filmmaker Purandar Chaudhuri. In these films, ‘Dhushor’, ‘Tremors’, and ‘Impressions of Mingling’, Chaudhuri challenges the usual links between image, subject, and narrative. His work fits into the tradition of cinematic modernism, but it is also rooted in today’s realities of migration and uncertainty.

Curator Johny ML describes melancholy and wandering as the foundation of these films. In ‘Dhushor’, a quintessential “anti-feature”, Chaudhuri uses what Gilles Deleuze calls the “time-image”: a post-World War II cinematic form in which direct time, rather than chronological movement, becomes the subject, liberating images from sensory-motor action. It captures time as a flow or “crystal” in which the actual and the virtual, the past and the present, coexist, challenging viewers to experience pure, durational time, often through long takes and complex memory structures. The film’s black-and-white scenes of ghats, interiors, and buildings are not mere background for the story. There are clear moments when past and present coexist without a clear ending. The reference to Satyajit Ray’s ‘Apur Sansar’ appears like a memory at the edge of forgetting.

While ‘Dhushor’ shows memory as something outside the body, ‘Tremors’ turns it inward. Chaudhuri uses editing techniques such as jump cuts and time shifts to disrupt the sense of a single self — techniques prevalent in modernist films. The film’s main image, the trembling body, can be understood through Michel Foucault’s idea that the body is shaped by power, time, and discipline. Each shake shows not only physical decline but also a loss of connection between the past and the present. The climax marks the point at which identity is no longer tied to memory but is scattered across time.

This logic of dispersal reaches its most acute articulation in ‘Impressions of Mingling’. Filmed across Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata, the work turns toward migrant labour but refuses the evidentiary claims of documentary realism. Instead, Chaudhuri’s images produce what Hito Steyerl has described as the “poor image” — degraded, unstable, and circulating at the edges of visibility. Figures appear as softened silhouettes, their contours dissolving into the urban fabric. They are visible ghosts: present, yet ungraspable. This is not an ethics of representation for its own sake, but a politics of opacity, in which the migrant body resists incorporation into the visual economy of recognition.

The exhibition’s photographic works, produced by Prakash Braggs, extend this condition into material form. Alternative processes such as selenium-toned kallitypes and archival prints foreground the Benjaminian decay of aura in mechanical reproduction, even as they paradoxically attempt to restore it through artisanal technique. The images appear already aged, their surfaces marked by a temporal instability that mirrors the films’ preoccupation with impermanence. Photography here does not arrest time; it exposes its erosion.

Throughout Chaudhuri’s work, there is a constant questioning of the image as a place of displacement. His films move between abstraction and clear representation, avoiding both the openness of documentary and the finality of narrative fiction. This approach aligns with a broader trend in today’s moving images, where the question is no longer what the image shows, but how it endures — or fails to endure — within regimes of visibility shaped by migration, labor, and historical memory.

Learn more about ‘A Voyage To Permanence’ here.

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