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From chawls to trains: Sudarshan Shetty’s immersive Mumbai experience at Serendipity Arts

Sudarshan Shetty on capturing the rhythm and tempo of Mumbai in his video titled A Breath Held Long, showing at the Serendipity Arts Festival

5 min readDec 13, 2025 02:21 PM IST

Sudarshan Shetty

Growing up in a modest one-room chawl in Mumbai’s Byculla neighbourhood, artist Sudarshan Shetty distinctly remembers the numerous sounds that surrounded him: from the call of the hawkers to vendors strumming instruments to fluff cotton for mattresses to the echo of trains heard from a distance. As a young boy he did not pay much attention to the everyday din but it did become part of his subconscious memory. The nature of the hum might have changed when he later moved to Dadar and was a student at the Sir JJ School of Art. But it’s there even now when he works out of his studio near Chembur.

In his video, titled A Breath Held Long, showing at Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa — alongside his sculptural objects dictated by the content within the video — he ponders on this impossibility of silence, proposing an intersection between voice, body and the city and the act of breathing as a metaphor for life within an urban landscape. “The act of breathing in and out becomes a compositional device, intervals through which rhythm and exhaustion surface as material conditions for speaking and being,” says Shetty, in his video.

On view at the Directorate of Accounts Building, near the Mandovi river waterfront, the video, on 16 mm celluloid, opens atmospherically with dark clouds floating in the sky. In its 29 minutes, viewers traverse through the city in a non-linear narrative where actors and non-actors share experiences from within the city in third-person accounts “without punctuation”. The scenes shift from a protagonist speaking from a bench underneath street lights with traffic rushing past to a woman climbing a narrow wooden staircase in what appears to be a chawl. A group of youngsters sits on a flight of stairs under an overbridge, and another segment has been shot inside an overfilled grocery store.

“Several of the sequences are reminiscent of my experience of growing up in this breathless urban landscape. It’s an effort to capture the intangible character of the city that I hold dear to me, which perhaps is not the Mumbai typically represented in popular images,” shares the artist. The vignettes themselves come from notations scribbled by Shetty, reflective of his own experiences and observations, ranging from moments of discoveries to rekindling old memories, finding and losing love. The city is seen slipping by from inside a bus with singers performing. “This is inspired by my experience of travelling by train where very often one may find a group of commuters break into a chorus. I wanted to recreate that and include it in the video as one of the stories itself,” says Shetty.

A still from the video installation

The soundtrack also features Madhup Mudgal’s Murshid nainon beech nabi hai, a doha by Kabir, where the words talk of a path to an inward journey and the experience of the emptiness within a bustling city.

Known to bring together the poetic and the philosophical, blending sculpture, installation and moving images to explore lived experiences and impermanence, this is not Shetty’s first engagement with Mumbai as a subject. In 2012, he transformed one of its most beloved relics, the double-decker bus, into a public installation. Stationed at the Bandra-Kurla Complex, his Flying Bus was fitted with wing-like extensions. The 2010 exhibition, “This Too Shall Pass”, at Mumbai’s Bhau Daji Lad Museum, saw him respond to the museum collection through exhibits for which he also sourced found objects from the city’s markets to explore afterlives and reflect on Mumbai’s own shifting landscape. In the 2013 video Waiting for Others to Arrive, he took viewers into an abandoned Ghatkopar chawl that was soon to be razed. “I grew up in this city, it’s a part of my being. However much I may love or hate it in equal measure, I feel a compulsion to talk about deeply personal experiences of living through it, that may be of some meaning for others too. There is a wealth of things that need to be exhumed,” he says.
And though these lived experiences could belong to any place on the map, it is Mumbai that also stays with the viewers. In the final stretch, shot from inside a local train, the camera looks out onto the tracks that seem to run endlessly. The moment connects to a graffiti seen earlier in the film, that read: ‘Sometimes when we travel we forget who we are’, a line that, perhaps, gestures toward the journey of life itself.

Vandana Kalra

Vandana Kalra is an art critic and Deputy Associate Editor with The Indian Express. She has spent more than two decades chronicling arts, culture and everyday life, with modern and contemporary art at the heart of her practice. With a sustained engagement in the arts and a deep understanding of India’s cultural ecosystem, she is regarded as a distinctive and authoritative voice in contemporary art journalism in India. Vandana Kalra's career has unfolded in step with the shifting contours of India’s cultural landscape, from the rise of the Indian art market to the growing prominence of global biennales and fairs. Closely tracking its ebbs and surges, she reports from studios, galleries, museums and exhibition spaces and has covered major Indian and international art fairs, museum exhibitions and biennales, including the Venice Biennale, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Documenta, Islamic Arts Biennale. She has also been invited to cover landmark moments in modern Indian art, including SH Raza’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the opening of the MF Husain Museum in Doha, reflecting her long engagement with the legacies of India’s modern masters. Alongside her writing, she applies a keen editorial sensibility, shaping and editing art and cultural coverage into informed, cohesive narratives. Through incisive features, interviews and critical reviews, she brings clarity to complex artistic conversations, foregrounding questions of process, patronage, craft, identity and cultural memory. The Global Art Circuit: She provides extensive coverage of major events like the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Serendipity Arts Festival, and high-profile international auctions. Artist Spotlights: She writes in-depth features on modern masters (like M.F. Husain) and contemporary performance artists (like Marina Abramović). Art and Labor: A recurring theme in her writing is how art reflects the lives of the marginalized, including migrants, farmers, and labourers. Recent Notable Articles (Late 2025) Her recent portfolio is dominated by the coverage of the 2025 art season in India: 1. Kochi-Muziris Biennale & Serendipity Arts Festival "At Serendipity Arts Festival, a 'Shark Tank' of sorts for art and crafts startups" (Dec 20, 2025): On how a new incubator is helping artisans pitch products to investors. "Artist Birender Yadav's work gives voice to the migrant self" (Dec 17, 2025): A profile of an artist whose decade-long practice focuses on brick kiln workers. "At Kochi-Muziris Biennale, a farmer’s son from Patiala uses his art to draw attention to Delhi’s polluted air" (Dec 16, 2025). "Kochi Biennale showstopper Marina Abramović, a pioneer in performance art" (Dec 7, 2025): An interview with the world-renowned artist on the power of reinvention. 2. M.F. Husain & Modernism "Inside the new MF Husain Museum in Qatar" (Nov 29, 2025): A three-part series on the opening of Lawh Wa Qalam in Doha, exploring how a 2008 sketch became the architectural core of the museum. "Doha opens Lawh Wa Qalam: Celebrating the modernist's global legacy" (Nov 29, 2025). 3. Art Market & Records "Frida Kahlo sets record for the most expensive work by a female artist" (Nov 21, 2025): On Kahlo's canvas The Dream (The Bed) selling for $54.7 million. "All you need to know about Klimt’s canvas that is now the most expensive modern artwork" (Nov 19, 2025). "What’s special about a $12.1 million gold toilet?" (Nov 19, 2025): A quirky look at a flushable 18-karat gold artwork. 4. Art Education & History "Art as play: How process-driven activities are changing the way children learn art in India" (Nov 23, 2025). "A glimpse of Goa's layered history at Serendipity Arts Festival" (Dec 9, 2025): Exploring historical landmarks as venues for contemporary art. Signature Beats Vandana is known for her investigative approach to the art economy, having recently written about "Who funds the Kochi-Muziris Biennale?" (Dec 11, 2025), detailing the role of "Platinum Benefactors." She also explores the spiritual and geometric aspects of art, as seen in her retrospective on artist Akkitham Narayanan and the history of the Cholamandal Artists' Village (Nov 22, 2025). ... Read More

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