Soliloquy is not a term one would usually associate with Noida. This literary device sees a character speaking one's thoughts aloud when alone or regardless of any hearers. It evokes exquisite Shakespearean dialogue and unforgettable characters who debate morality and the meaning of life. For instance, Hamlet’s weighty “to be or not to be” or Prospero’s moving “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Noida, on the other hand, is an abbreviation of the rather unpoetic “Naveen Okhla Industrial Development Authority”, which conjures images of concrete apartment blocks, mega malls, call centres, busy highways and vast swathes of construction land. Difficult then, you would think, to bring the two together. The current exhibition of Dhruv Malhotra’s photographs at Photoink, however, may just change your mind.
   
“Noida Soliloquy” comprises a set of twenty-four pictures, and while there is nothing new about an artist romanticizing the unromantic, Malhotra has managed to coax poetry out of the mundane. For this Noida-based photographer, being an insomniac has reaped its reward. The pictures were taken between twilight and dawn in some of the least evocative spaces Noida has to offer – junk-ridden parking lots, empty streets, roadside shacks, shoddy construction sites and desolate fields.

Amidst the rapid changes that the area has seen, Malhotra has found quiet pockets of contemplation. One photograph, for example, is of a line of lonely graves in a overgrown field. The sky is grey and the headstones stand stark and striking against this bleakness. Another captures mist rising over a dirt track; a row of street lights glow in the far distance. It looks like the slice of a dream.

It’s hard to believe, though, that most of the pictures were shot at night. Instead of black and darkness, they are filled with luminous colours – blood-red orange skies, bright cobalt blue, virulent green grass, egg-yolk yellow and shiny lead grey. The reason for this is extremely long exposure time, which ranged from five to forty minutes. Over such prolonged periods, film absorbs a wide array of light from passing cars, starlight, moonlight and street lamps.

The gradual accumulation of these rays gives the photographs their unworldly vividness. As every photographer knows, it’s a delicate and tense process as there is a limit to how long film can be exposed before something called “reciprocity failure” sets in. This is when the film is much too damaged to be used. Malhotra pushes his medium to the limit and opens up the darkness to the viewer’s eyes.

Although perhaps not the photographer’s primary aim, these photographs carry a strong sense of the eerie and surreal. In some pictures, the trees, all gnarled and mangled, are lit by a ghostly light. In another an electric tower in an open field looms against a red Martian sky filled with spooky trails of starlight – it seems somehow apocalyptic. Most bizarre, however, is the image of a white rabbit abandoned in a shadowy field. Like in Donnie Darko, it could be a messenger of madness. The sense of dread deepens with Malhotra’s picture of a row of Mayavati statues. Hooded in bright blue tarpaulin, they stand around a tall cement pillar as though gathering to carry out mysterious cult rituals. Again, the sky is filled with trails of end-of-the- world starlight.

Malhotra’s images demand the viewer to observe them for a long while. Only then can you notice the finer details – the dancing statue in the parking lot, the way the light falls on an anonymous street sleeper, the cycle rickshaw half-drowned in a stream. With not a waking soul around him while he worked, Malhotra has given us exactly what the title claims – soliloquies that vary delicately in mood and ambience, some frightening, some sad and some plain bizarre. The very stuff that Shakespeare’s monologues are made of.