This performance/installation was part of a public art workshop in which I was looking at how the private and public realms collide. I became fascinated by laundry and in particular with the clothesline. In our society where privacy, honor (and shame) are so intensely guarded, a household gives us a peak into it’s life through the clothes hung out to dry. I began trying to guess who lived in the houses (young, old, men women, children, etc.) by studying/spying on laundry drying.

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This led to a parallel examination of public places and public monuments, which a nation gives a peak into its psyche. Instead of great heroes, patriots or great thinkers, we have erected missiles and fighter planes at our public intersections. One such tribute to violence is a fighter jet mounted at ‘China Chowk’. This for me became not a source of pride but in a sense ‘the nation’s dirty laundry’.

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I took both these investigations and decided to hang garments dyed red on the fighter jet at noon (rush hour in effect), to contrast this small private act of love(washing someone’s clothes) and juxtapose it with the public barbarism of war and killing. Macbethian in that the blood of those killed should still be on our collective conscious.

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An intelligence officer was there within the twenty minutes of this hit and run piece and tried to interrogate me, as to what was the meaning of me trying to desecrate this public monument but I swiftly escaped.

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