Zeitschichten: The Watson’s Hotel

The exhibition “Zeitschichten: The Watson’s Hotel” sheds light on the eventful history of an architectural milestone in Mumbai. Built in 1867, the building is considered the first prefabricated cast-iron house in India and is inseparably linked to the birth of cinema: it was here that the Lumière brothers gave their first film screening in India in 1896. Today, however, the building is the scene of a dramatic struggle for survival between historic heritage and urban decay.

The documentary film “The Watson’s Hotel”, which Ragunath V realised in 2018 together with Nathaniel Knop and Peter Rippl, marked the beginning of an intensive engagement with the fate of the house and its residents. After the building was evacuated in 2019 and its residents lost their homes, a court ordered its demolition in 2021, citing an alleged risk of collapse. But thanks to the influence of the film and the tireless commitment of activists and architects, an independent expert report was able to prove that the basic structure of the house had remained stable despite numerous illegal alterations. This effort ultimately led the court to order the faithful restoration of the building in 2022.

Since the eviction in 2019, Ragunath V has continuously documented the façade of the house photographically. The works shown in this exhibition are time collages that let photographs from 2019, 2024 and 2026 flow into one another. By precisely superimposing different states on a fixed basic grid of the view of the house, the fine lines of the original architecture merge with the hard grids of modern scaffolding and protective netting. These visual fusions make the slow transformation – the gradual removal of traces of decades of neglect – immediately tangible for the viewer.

Like a layer of dust being gently wiped away, the works reveal the hidden beauty of the house beneath the layers of the present – from the filigree window fronts to the bureaucratic “NOTICE” signs on the construction fence. The series also integrates fragments of today’s city life, such as the bright blue tarpaulins or the striking yellow of passing taxis, into the historic grid. The exhibition thus sees itself as a homage to the resilience of the structure and as a hopeful outlook on a near future in which the Watson’s Hotel returns to its original splendour.

Exhibition
The exhibition took place at the “Kutscherhaus”, AtelierFrankfurt, from 20 March to 30 April 2026.

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