Small talk

Devised in Tokyo in 2003,Pecha Kucha has caught the imagination of a busy world and is now held across the globe,in 170 countries. The event in Delhi ran parallel to one in Auckland,New Zealand,while today there will be Pecha Kucha nights in Frankfurt and Shanghai.

The theme at Khoj was “Public Works Department: Art on Infrastructure + Art as Infrastructure + Infrastructure as Art” and the nine participants ranged from architects like Vir Singh to video artist Sonia Khurana to environmentalist Govind Singh. A graffiti artist who goes by the name .nox presented,what he calls,“subversive art on the city and infrastructure and the rise of petroleum dependence.”

Architect Rohit Mehndiratta used slides from his portfolio that ranged from airport sub-stations to a small greenhouse to show how “functionality can get expression beyond utility to enter into the territory of art”. He kept words to the minimum to increase the impact. “I did describe a few images but most pictures spoke for themselves,” he says.

Khurana describes the event as “talking in cryptic clues” and accordingly,highlighted the human aspects of infrastructure through images that included a huge billboard that she showed in Valencia last year.