When a speaker ascends the dais or starts the PowerPoint, do you find yourself wondering, will she keep it short? With the art form Pecha Kucha (pronounced ‘pe-chak-cha’ and meaning ‘chit-chat’ in Japanese), you wouldn’t have the time to start worrying.

Pecha Kucha is a form of visual presentation in which participants can speak about their work only through 20 images, with 20 seconds for each image. “Each speaker gets 6.40 minutes. Each talk is brief, focused and intense,” says Vishal Rowlley of Khoj Studios, which hosted a a Pecha Kucha Night yesterday.

Devised in Tokyo in 2003, Pecha Kucha has caught the imagination of a busy world and is now held across the globe, in 170 countries. The event in Delhi ran parallel to one in Auckland, New Zealand, while today there will be Pecha Kucha nights in Frankfurt and Shanghai.

The theme at Khoj was “Public Works Department: Art on Infrastructure + Art as Infrastructure + Infrastructure as Art” and the nine participants ranged from architects like Vir Singh to video artist Sonia Khurana to environmentalist Govind Singh. A graffiti artist who goes by the name .nox presented, what he calls, “subversive art on the city and infrastructure and the rise of petroleum dependence.”

Architect Rohit Mehndiratta used slides from his portfolio that ranged from airport sub-stations to a small greenhouse to show how “functionality can get expression beyond utility to enter into the territory of art”. He kept words to the minimum to increase the impact. “I did describe a few images but most pictures spoke for themselves,” he says.

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