Perhaps the best way to capture Mumbai’s cityscape is vertically. For a city whose collective infrastructure stands across multiple layers, life is carried on in between skyscrapers, heritage buildings, informal structures and work-in-progress projects on almost every road. CAMP, a Mumbai-based collaborative studio, brings this view to Sassoon Docks with a seven-screen installation titled Bombay Tilts Down, sharing a critical engagement with CCTV surveillance as a medium re-appropriated for artistic use. The viewing is presented by art gallery Experimenter in collaboration with St+art India Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that creates public art, during Mumbai Gallery Weekend.

The installation is immersive, reiterating unconsciously registered views of the city as some would individually experience it from a vantage point. The seven adjacent screens play a looped video of over 13 minutes, filmed from a single-point location: a CCTV camera from the roof of a 35-floor hotel in Central Mumbai filmed over many months during the COVID-19 pandemic. By changing the hands of control of this surveillance and its purpose, the project creates a lens for and captures new relationships between people, infrastructure, lines and layers in the city.