Kush Kukreja
Only In Good Taste

Exhibition Details

As it flows through the city of Delhi, the Yamuna River is one of the most polluted in the world. For Kush Kukreja, born and raised in the Indian capital, it is part of a familiar landscape. He crosses it twice a day on his way to University, he sees it flooding after the monsoons and receding in the following season. His perception of the river takes shape in everyday life. It is a much more layered and complex idea, he notes, than the photographs of tradition that have sculpted the Yamuna as “the polluted river.”

Only In Good Taste tries to deconstruct a symbol of the Anthropocene and portray it in a new way. In order to do so, Kukreja tells us, the photographer cannot be a detached and objective bystander, nor the river a passive object: the two will have to collaborate. It will become necessary to wear other people’s clothes, to appropriate methods and invent criteria. On the banks of the river, Kukreja is a surveyor measuring the speed of water, analyzing the soil, and recording the diameter of a pillar. In the darkroom he is a chemist watching iron, magnesium, and corrosive agents extracted from the river as they emerge on photographic paper.

The camera becomes a ruler, a stopwatch, a microscope. The tool and the pretext for an analysis oscillating between the scientific and the absurd. And while his images seem to have the power to build bridges, destroy power plants and make skyscrapers disappear, Kukreja asks us to borrow his critical thinking and his inventiveness, and use them to observe.