The Body Electric, 2008

Click here to view a trailer.

The Body Electric revolves around various playful fictions of empire and nation-state, using a video loop of classically trained Indian dancers in 1980s aerobic gear doing a specially choreographed totalitarian-electronic workout in front of the Breach Candy swimming pool.

This pool, built in the 1920s in the last days of the Raj, is still in the shape of greater India – a territory only given form in retrospect, but which encompasses what are now Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The idea being to question the very celebration of nationalism that goes with the Olympic ideal, and the retrospective unification of a series of independent feudal and princely states.

Also referencing the post-war aspirations of a newly independent India, the patterns and designs of the dancers' workout gear, and the building blocks used as the set design in parts of the video is drawn from patterns and geometries utilised by Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret in their development of the master-planned city of Chandigarh, commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru as a symbol of Modern, independent India.

Both the video and the soundtrack were developed collaboratively between artist Shezad Dawood and electronica musician and artist Mukul Deora.