[Those] who [are] subjected to a field of visibility, and who know it, assume responsibility for the constraints of power; [they] make them play spontaneously upon [themselves]; [they] inscribe in [themselves] the power relation in which [they] simultaneously plays both roles; [they] become the principle of [their] own subjection.

― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Harmeet Rattan’s practice is a critique of the hyper-networked surveillance infrastructures that
create a parallel social and political order to the assumed complacency of everyday spaces,
both public and private. Foucault’s writings on the panopticon effect are more prescient than
even, as we are in a state of constant incarceration with surveillance cameras at every street
corner in metropolises like Delhi and the possibility of cell phone cameras peering upon
action/inaction in the most intimate of spaces, while algorithms track and predict our
unconscious patterns of engagement with the digital realm. We are constantly being watched,
and our biology is constantly monitored and traced, which orders our behavior every waking
moment. Rattan develops a material ontology that maps the infrastructure that aids this
all-pervading gaze, pointing to a world submerged beyond the scope of vision, a technocratic
megastructure consisting of cameras, sensors, laser lights, ultrasonic waves and satellites.
The amorphous forms of the fragmented, partially demolished buildings gestures towards
constantly altering cityscapes, and the rush to inscribe and reinscribe human-made structures,
to be contoured to the latest possibilities presented by development-philic updates to physical
infrastructure and technology. The orbit of satellites, and space debris that dot the outer layers
of the Earth's atmosphere lays the blueprint to dictate and control a subterranean future city,
and its aspirations, without asserting their gaze with any visibility to the subjects of their
surveillance. Rattan’s canvases render visible and reify the invisible structures of power that
operate on all life forms across the planet.