Pipes and Leaks (2023)

Site-spesific participatory installation
In collaboration with Ronak Soni

At Mumbai Urban Arts Festival

In Pipes and Leaks (2022–23), the material is Mumbai’s water infrastructure — pipes, concrete, and the leak, all equally ubiquitous in the city’s fabric, but whose permutations are dictated by systems that include certain bodies and structurally exclude others. Water in Mumbai is a governed entity more than an essential resource: directed through formal networks toward those who hold legal connections, withheld from informal settlements who don’t. The body denied water is, by design, the dirty body — without means to clean, it is permanently positioned as requiring management, as evidence of its own supposed disorder, and a threat to the health of other bodies it comes in contact with. So the contact is minimized, infused with fear, derision, disgust, and then labelled with the rhetoric of tribalism. Before municipal elections, water access becomes a bargaining instrument, a promise extended and withdrawn along lines that ensure certain communities remain structurally dependent, their dignity always subject to negotiation and timing.

What appears as a leak — the pipe seeping through a wall, the connection spliced beneath a road — basically a failure, is actually the system’s necessary byproduct. The point where what has been officially withheld escapes and sustains life and some measure of dignity outside the sanctioned circuit. Informality here is the form governance takes in order to maintain its leverage over the bodies it has decided to keep conditional.

The installation was developed in dialogue with Pani Haq Samiti, a grassroots movement working for equitable water access in Mumbai’s informal settlements. The pipes used in the work were temporarily sourced and returned to vendors after the exhibition, re-entering supply chains rather than becoming waste. The material logic enacts the argument: nothing settles, everything circulates, access is perpetually conditional. Configured as a fountain, the work brings underground infrastructure to the surface. Viewers enter as participants — their bodies occupying a position within the flow, asked to hold the uncertainty of whether they are the ones who have access, or the ones who do not.