The act of waiting is funny — having time at your disposal without wanting it. What do you do when you wait? Time can no longer be traversed and it should suddenly be endured. Some do it with hope, some with indifference, and most out of helplessness. Wavering between fascination and boredom, intimacy and distance, focus and distraction, waiting strands you in an oscillating plane of limbo. Thus bus stations, lobbies, airports and park benches often become temporal spaces of existential self encounters, and as waiters (who wait for, not on) we look for coping mechanisms. This heightened sense of physical consciousness that one feels in a hospital waiting room along with a certain powerlessness assimilates them into an object-like status. The waiter’s agitation, pacing, fixation on objects around and glances at their watches becomes a way of respite from passing of time. 

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‘The Waiting Room’ is an online installation which captures the nuances of this experience. It highlights that the compulsion to embody it and perform waiting is inescapable. Visually juxtaposing various Indian contexts, postures, and motives of the participants, it is a series of frames — separated in space — brought together in a digital waiting room on the internet. Inevitably as a thought experiment on voyeurism due its nature, it openly invites participation, observation and reading between the lines.