Compression is a crucial gesture to Manish Nai's practice, an apt and widely applicable metaphor for any number of pressures, be it the pressure of history, the pressure of social expectation, or even the physical pressures of being in a densely packed contemporary Indian city. Here, Nai applies pressure to balls made from soaked newspaper pages. India has over 100 daily newspapers in numerous languages, tens or hundreds of billions of pages produced daily, reflecting innumerable viewpoints and cultural perspectives throughout India. Compressing them together here is a clever analogy for a diverse metropolis like Mumbai, the. collective form even feeling rather like a high rise building filled with the very people who would receive the newspapers, speak the languages, and experience the cultures therein. The stratified layers, however, also very much recall sedimentary rock, a visual representation of time, the influence of history that can be felt at the foundation of contemporary Indian society.