Projection, water feature, paper boats, mobile phone, QR code, urn, Blinkit uniform and bag

Blinkit is an Indian quick commerce app which promises the delivery of goods in 10 minutes. On a PICA residency in Delhi 2025, I  interviewed riders about the pressures to meet such demands and ways in which the app controls riders through incentives and penalties.

Presented as an expanded installation, dark store combined rider testimony with a series of spatial and participatory elements that brought the logistics of platform labour into the gallery. Alongside the large-scale video projection, the work included an area where visitors made use of a blinkit marketing campaign - folding paper boats from delivery bags, which were then floated in a shallow water feature reflecting the projected image. The boats inevitably took on water and began to sink, echoing the fragility of the life of a gig worker expressed in the rider’s testimony.  Hanging from the gallery entrance was a worn Blinkit uniform and delivery bag, and a phone displaying the blinkit app showing a map of  a delivery rider en route to the gallery. Outside the space was a monitor with a still camera view of one of Blinkit’s “dark stores” where produce is frantically packed by teams of workers and collected by the riders for delivery. A QR code enabled visitors to order instant noodles through the Blinkit app, which were delivered, prepared and consumed in the gallery using a hot water urn.

Together, these elements positioned the audience inside the system the work examined. Viewers were not only witnesses to riders’ accounts of labour, speed and pressure, but were also implicated as participants in the circuits of convenience, instruction, consumption and demand that structure platform-based delivery work.

This work was presented at Khoj in 2025 and as part of the symposium: Notes from the Digital Underground: Bodies–Machines–Publics, New Delhi, January 2026.