The transit experience

What comes to mind when you think of art in a hotel? A few paintings on the wall, maybe a mural… At Dusit D2, the soon-to-open business-lifestyle hotel at Aerocity, the upcoming hotel district next to New Delhi's T3 airport terminus, however, the element of art manifests itself as a book placed in each of its 231 rooms.

Called Bathtub, this is a collection of stories by young author Arjun Puri and artwork by Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, the artist pair known for their zany, colourful pop-kitsch idiom. Unsurprisingly, given that Dusit D2 will primarily be a transit hotel, the stories in Bathtub have all to do with travel, airports, that feeling of half-disorientation, half-recognition that one feels on a first visit to a foreign land and the random connections that so many thousands of humans crisscrossing paths will inevitably forge. So there's a story of a Sikh from Canada returning home for the first time in 24 years, a German who comes to India looking for a girlfriend who'd ditched him only to find love and life here, a Japanese and an Indian traveller who become friends when their laptops get exchanged and so on.

Thukral and Tagra's -- or T&T as they are better known -- contribution are the visuals, particularly a series of lithographic prints made for the project. These six prints, which will also be put up in each room, draw on the theme of passport. So the backgrounds look like the pages of a passport, with their muted pastel background, punched numbers and Guilloche patterns. Over this, the artists depict a collage of disparate motifs taken from the stories - a tree, a Georgian antique chair, cowboy, something that looks like a futuristic train and characters from the Japanese script, and the ubiquitous bathtub, six different ones in six different shapes.

Why bathtub? "The bathtub is a metaphor for unwinding," explains Sumir Tagra, at 36, the junior member of the duo. "It's something you do at the end of a tough day...instead of saying 'bedtime', we said 'bath time'. Also, how many times can you say hotel or residency - we wanted to get away from those typically used words," he adds. But those are conceptual, abstract thoughts - the immediate visual impulse for the title, Bathtub, was what T&T saw the first time they visited the site - a large stack of bathtubs piled one on top of the other. "Ankur [Bhatia, executive director of the Bird Group, which owns the hotel] intends that space to be an amphitheatre, and we're thinking that we might want to launch the book there with a skit, or performance," says Jiten Thukral.

If Bathtub is a marketing exercise - it is definitely an attempt to infuse some excitement around the hotel brand, setting it apart from a crush of other, marquee properties next door - it is an imaginative one, and worked out at several levels. The book theme, for instance, is elaborated with each of the rooms called chapters, and each floor called a storey. T&T, who seem to have emerged as something of an aesthetic consultant for the hotel, will also be coming up with signature chocolates for it - one shape for each floor, err story. There are plans, also, to extend the concept into a film, taking off, says Sumir Tagra, on "all that sound, of planes going up and down...zzzz, zzzz....everyday".

For the artists, however, fresh from their show Games People Play at Mumbai's Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, the art at Dusit D2 expands on a theme they've been working on since 2007 - "the idea of a journey both inwards and outwards". The Dusit D2 prints, for instance, are very similar to what the artists had made during a residency at Edition Copenhagen, the prestigious gallery and litho-print workshop in the Danish capital, in 2012. Called 'Page 16, Yes, I went to School' and 'Page 62, Swatuntar Kumar Sharma', these were art prints depicting pages, or so the artists would have us imagine, taken from a book about a man who wants to travel.

That same year, at Copenhagen's Arken Museum, T&T showed an installation titled Escape!Reset/Resume that elaborated on the same theme. The entire room was made to resemble an airport lounge/airplane cabin, with piles of luggage covered in mismatched fabric, a screen on the backs of seats, and an ingenious, interactive book with stories and images that people could mix and match as they liked, to create their own stories.

After all, there is nothing like a good story to enliven a journey.