This piece traces the shifting cultural meaning of cigarettes—from their early glorification in media and cinema to their quiet afterlife as waste—before turning to sculptor Prashant Pandey’s practice. Drawing from personal memory and popular culture, it examines how cigarettes function as symbols of cool, ritual, and pause. Pandey’s work reclaims discarded cigarette butts as carriers of collective memory, transforming anonymous remnants into sculptural forms that document gestures rather than events. His installation Biography, made from over 350,000 cigarette butts, reframes waste as a record of lived time, presence, and shared social behaviour.
Cigarettes and the media have always shared a complicated relationship. As far back as the 1930s, even medical professionals actively encouraged smoking in advertisements — not just as a stress reliever, but as something that supposedly offered health benefits. (I know. Completely unhinged.) It wasn’t until the 1950s and 60s that reports detailing the ill effects of cigarettes began to surface, slowly shifting public opinion.
Cigarettes have been everywhere in popular culture — from Rajinikanth’s iconic turn-and-spin, to Sharon Stone lighting up during the interrogation scene in Basic Instinct. They were, and to some extent still are, shorthand for inimitable swag and effortless cool.
I remember smoking my first cigarette in my first year of college. There was something dangerous and mysterious about standing in a dark lane with the first friend I had ever made on campus. And of course, the most satisfying part of it all was ashing the cigarette onto the ground and stomping it out, like you’d accomplished something monumental, other than slightly increasing your chances of heart disease.
Pandey's work becomes a unit of time, a marker of pause, stress, pleasure, or boredom.In earlier works, cigarette butts appear as dense accumulations where the residue of consumption becomes inseparable from the form itself. These works resist easy readings of morality or vice. Instead,the cigarette butt is foregrounded as an object that has passed through intimacy: held between fingers, raised to lips and discarded without any ceremony. By working with a material that is both deeply personal and aggressively public, Pandey positions smoking not as an isolated act, but as a shared social ritual, one that leaves behind a trail of identical, anonymous remains.
This thinking finds its most distilled expression in Biography, a work composed of over 350,000 discarded cigarette butts collected over five years. Stripped of branding and individual ownership, the cigarette butts cease to signify addiction or coolness and instead operate as traces of presence. Biography does not document famous lives or historical events; it records gestures. Each butt stands in for a moment of waiting, thinking, finishing something, or beginning again. In this way, the work reads less like an archive and more like a quiet accumulation of lived time, where the smallest, most forgettable acts coalesce into something monumental.
Seen against the long history of cigarettes in the media, Pandey’s work offers a subtle but radical shift. He is uninterested in the spectacle of smoking and far more invested in what remains after the performance is over. What we instinctively crush underfoot becomes, in his hands, a site of remembrance, proof that even the most disposable objects hold the weight of collective experience.
Biography is open for public viewing Monday through Sunday, from 11am to 7pm until 28th February at Gallery Maskara, Mumbai.
You can follow the artist here, to know more.
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