Looking In/Looking Out: Contemporary Indian Photography from the Guar Collection

Project Y (Public. Art. Outreach) was a project held on the banks of the River Yamuna in Delhi. The event was part of a twin city Yamuna-Elbe Project1 which took place in Hamburg and Delhi in October and November 2011. The curatorial ideas to guide Project Y were to re-imagine and change the dominant narrative of the river as being ‘dirty’ to it being ‘beautiful’, and to ‘reproduce’ it as an ecological public space accessible to all. It was also a proposal for an ecologically sustainable Delhi, which is currently facing severe stress. Questions like ‘should rivers just be left alone and allowed to flow unfettered, irrespective of their utility’, or ‘how should we think of rivers, ecosystems, technology and urban spaces’ or ‘what happens when we replace economy with ecology’, and ‘does development answers the question of ecology’, were inscribed within.