The grid: Man’s best friend, 2045

Reality blurs with fiction in The Sun Rises in the East, a speculative series by Indian film-maker and photographer Ronny Sen. He depicts the quotidian warmth of a boy and his dog; only it’s 2045, the dog is a wooden analogue learning machine deployed by the US air force during the second world war, and the setting is an abandoned airfield in Bengal – one of many built by the Allied forces in the 1940s.

Raising questions about photography as fact, our relationship with machine sentience and colonial shaping of climate systems, Sen explains that, in the subcontinent: “[Modernity] appears in fragments, ruins, leftovers, imported systems, unfinished infrastructure and broken promises. The future does not replace the past; it piles on to it.”

Works from Ronny Sen’s The Sun Rises in the East are on sale from TARQ gallery, Mumbai