beneath the placid lake

beneath the placid lake is a projection-based installation that examines the multilayered spatial, social, and cultural aftermath of displacement and slow violence following the creation of a massive dam in the southern Indian state of Telangana. The dam’s construction submerged roughly one hundred villages, forcing the relocation of about 150,000 people. Simultaneously, more than one hundred monumental temples were spared from the floodwaters through a complex process of salvage and preservation.
Drawing on archives found and collected by three generations of researchers, beneath the placid lake contemplates how experiences of space are transformed through forced evictions and when official, monumental histories intersect with submerged local narratives. The installation investigates how methods of knowledge production shape the representation of violence, often towards inevitability.
beneath the placid lake resists this normalization through its formal strategies – combining photographs, moving images, and textual annotations – ephemerally meeting on the screen’s surface as a platform for dreaming different futures at varying temporal scales.

Kush Badhwar is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose work explores social and spatial dynamics in peri-urban environments and amidst colossal development drives. Selected screening or exhibition of his work includes at Addis Video Art Festival, the Flaherty Seminar, Tallinn Photomonth Biennale, Experimenta Bangalore, and Videobrasil. In 2014, he was part of the Forum Expanded with the New Delhi-based collective Word Sound Power and the film Blood Earth.

Vyjayanthi Rao is an anthropologist, writer, and curator focusing on displacement, memory, heritage, and imaginaries of the future, with a particular interest in speculative practices in contemporary social life. She explores the connections between violence, ruination, uncertainty, and speculation in contemporary culture and has published widely on these subjects.

Directors Kush Badhwar, Vyjayanthi Rao. Producer Kush Badhwar. Production company waydk (Helsinki, Finland).

Films

Kush Badhwar: 2013: Blood Earth (35 min., Forum Expanded 2014), We in a One Room Kitchen (14 min.). 2014: Work Starts Now (9 min.). 2016: Geographies of Production (15 min.). 2019: 1000 Mornings (1 min.). 2020: Brave Revolutionary Redubbed (with Renu Savant, 20 min.). 2021: TXMALL (6 min.). 2022: Water on the City (1 min.). 2025: beneath the placid lake.