Take a camera and tilt it, you get a different angle from perception, a tilt-shot. Tilt it even further, add a personal aesthetic philosophy, and you get ‘Shot Tilt’. Last week saw the opening of Delhi based artist, Prasad Raghavan’s first solo exhibition – Shot Tilt, at Gallery BMB, Mumbai.

The show is a set of works exploring the society we live in today, which constantly generates desire, need and want amongst us all and how, ultimately, it can transform us into gluttonous consuming subjects. In his works Prasad debates the idea of desire and false promises, and believes the result is garbage and guilt. “There are a lot of false promises around us, the aim in these works is to analyze and understand desire and false promises through the creation of ‘false icons’ and the images of garbage, sin and guilt.”

Packed full of some of the most influential and significant people in today’s creative, art, design and advertising scene, Prasad’s works were suitably spaced out in the contemporary art space, curated by Bose Krishnamachari.

Within this, Shot-Tilt presents The Decalogue, a series of 10 life size portraits, each wearing service and work-based uniforms, depicting different characters in our society. All 10 stand anonymously with their faces covered in dark cloth, which questions the notion of identity. The Decalogue, 2010, is a monumentally sized 10-part piece of archival print, each section is an orderly mess of images from our modern lives which control us, from supermarket shopping aisles to the many logos we see so often and that demand attention.

Other works include an 18-foot installation - And The Ship Sails On, a highly political examination of today’s rapidly changing India. Each container is carrying the advertising straplines to India’s most powerful corporations, promising change with shallow guarantees. Prasad has also showcased a series of drawings and paintings, exploring how the combination of image and text in poster design can manipulate the essence of a larger narrative.

Underneath the wine clinks and chatter lay a rather dark message about the world we live in today. Consumerism, globalization and the devastation wreaked by man’s quest for power – is reflected strongly throughout the entire show. As guests we perhaps should have turned up in brown sacks and bare feet, and drunk water all night, but of course, this didn’t happen and we all surrendered to the fabulousness of the art scene. For Prasad, he’s put the writing on the wall. What’s coming through in his work is the essence of human nature is to control, own and concur, at any cost.

Whether you believe that or not, create a different tilt on something, it will open up a world of new perspective. Perhaps we all need to take a moment and realise how much he is so correct.