MUMBAI, March 21 -- It was at a residency in 2007, in Pittsburgh, USA, when contemporary artist Sudarshan Shetty realised how privileged he was to work from Mumbai. "Things come at you constantly here. You don't have to go looking for them," he says. The city's moods, colours, vibe, people, history, culture, food, emotions, hardships and challenges are fodder for creative minds, unlike in Pittsburgh, where Shetty had to find them. He would go to a mall and find just huge sections of sanitary ware and electrical machines and tools. "You have to go seek a catalogue there. Here (Mumbai), your catalogue just keeps getting thicker." These visuals -- memories of Shetty's experiences of living in Mumbai -- are unloaded in his work, a 29-minute film titled 'A Breath Held Long'. Commissioned by the Serendipity Arts Foundation, the work was first shown at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, in December last year. It will be shown at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial in November. Shot on 16mm celluloid, the film creates a non-linear narrative on Mumbai's sounds, people, routine, everyday life and built structures, featuring actors who deliver lines that have no punctuations. They look at the camera and narrate Shetty's text without any pauses, in a monotone: 'It was during a lazy summer afternoon when the front facade of the four storeyed building that was evacuated by the authorities'... '.the cotton saris she wore for her daily trips to the hospital with a stained cloth bag that carries his salt-less diet in an old brass lunch box'. And the last line of the film is 'what we carry from here to other side of last breath is an infinite universe of nothing'. In between, you see many familiar visuals -- of a family sleeping in a crowded chawl room, buildings and roads passing by the metro rail, the umbrellas and the rain, crumbling infrastructure, crowded streets, people playing cricket and more, shot in Dharavi, Malad, Byculla, Kurla and Dadar. "These are symbolic of a lot of things we live with," says Shetty. "I wanted to insert all that; not to give any particular message but to bring facets of life to the fore." "My work originated just as a way of getting out of any possible mannerisms that I may have gathered by being in the profession of making objects - wake up, have breakfast, go to the studio and work," he says. While that discipline is important to him, it also creates a pattern. "You tend to gather certain ways of making objects, which may be termed as mannerisms, which you need to get out of as an artist, constantly." Shetty's practice is dominated by large-scale installations and films. His 'Flying Bus' (2012), installed at Maker Maxity in the Bandra-Kurla Complex, is a 10-tonne public art installation featuring a 1970s replica of a double-decker bus with stainless steel wings. 'Shoonya Ghar' at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum (2017), featured multimedia installations including a sculpture and film, drawing from 12th-century poetic traditions, exploring the idea of nothingness. Shetty's present work shows how people adapt, adjust and find and create joy, although he has tweaked reality in some scenes. For instance, bananas being drawn up in a polythene bag to an upper floor of a chawl, is replaced by eggs. Singers on the train, which Shetty encountered every day on his daily commute from Ghatkopar to the Sir J J School of Art, are placed in a bus. "I have displaced the singers in the train to a public bus. While it's difficult to sing in a bus because it's a shorter ride, it doesn't quiet appear completely alien," he says. "It's what could be and yet quite not. I think these in-between spaces are more real in experience for me in experiencing the city. We always live in those in-between spaces." The work also draws from the Nirguna poetry, a form of devotional literature from the Indian Bhakti movement that focuses on a formless....