CHENNAI: A plate with only freshly fallen dry leaves - Besant Nagar. A near-clean plate with just a thin film of dust despite being outdoors, that's Mylapore and Saidapet.
A visibly dust-laden plate - Velachery and Chromepet. But to understand the contrast, one has to see the darkened plates from Ennore and its surrounding industrial belt.
These are "smog plates", left exposed in different neighbourhoods for nearly a month, allowing particulate matter in the air to settle naturally.
At Pugai Padam: When Smog Makes Art at Art Houz, these plates form the central narrative, where pollution itself produces the image and brings out the high-contrast lived experience.
"The campaign's idea is to deepen how people view pollution," said environmentalist Nityanand Jayaraman, adding that the plates reflect how caste and demography shape living conditions through policy decisions that determine where pollution concentrates.
The exhibition centres lived experience - who breathes what air, and where, describing this uneven exposure as slow environmental violence shaped by location and vulnerability.
Moving through the exhibition, the contrast is visible. Plates from Kodungaiyur, Ennore and Vyasarpadi show heavier exposure, while Kuruvimedu records some of the densest deposits, gathered near the Vallur thermal power plant's ash dyke where fly ash travels along roads used by ash trucks.
In Ennore–Athipattu, air, water and land have long been shaped by thermal power plants, ash ponds, petrochemical units, ports and waste yards. Coal ash has moved through pipelines, trucks and wind, settling into wetlands, homes and lungs.
Over the years, studies and field reports have linked fly ash to contamination of the creek, ecological damage, loss of fisheries, and persistent respiratory and skin illness among residents.
"Newborns in Ennore have a very high chance of developing wheezing. Many who don't show symptoms early develop them later. Men often die in their 40s, leaving women to carry the burden of both care and livelihood," said Subhashini, a resident.
The exhibition runs as a three-day public campaign, placing side-by-side plates from across the city to document differences in everyday exposure and foreground lived accounts from pollution-burdened neighbourhoods in north Chennai.