ATWB
Ate The Wrong Breakfast
Kanika Sethi: Creative Director and Art Director
Photographer: Janaki Nambiar @jxnx.ki
Hair & Makeup: Aaria Pawar @aariapawar_artistry
A conceptual creative shoot conceived and led by Kanika Sethi, serving as Creative Director and Art Director—overseeing the project end-to-end from concept creation and visual identity to set design, props, and 12 multidisciplinary team direction.
The project leans into eccentricity, absurdity, and disruption. ATWB is a meditation on misalignment. On mornings that begin wrong not because of chaos, but because what is offered does not match what is needed. Breakfast, in ATWB, becomes a symbol of daily conditioning—what we consume to function, comply, perform.
Visually, ATWB sets are theatrical and exaggerated, the props intentionally wrong, the characters caught in moments that feel slightly off but deeply recognisable. Characters that invite curiosity before revealing critique.
ATWB is not about food.
It is about systems, identities, cultural digestion and the choices that shape who gets nourished—and who doesn’t.
DRAG IS AMONGST US
Drag queens are placed in an office setting where their glamour, confidence, and theatricality coexist with desks, files, printers, and stationery- turning a workday into a performance.
Drag Is Amongst Us imagines a corporate workspace subtly invaded by drag—not as disruption, but as presence. The idea stems from the feeling of being offered the wrong breakfast: when the environment looks correct, the structure is in place, yet an intentional misalignment that critiques systems incapable of nourishing identities that don’t conform.
Purpose
Drag Is Amongst Us celebrates drag as everyday presence rather than spectacle.
It turns the corporate workspace into a stage without asking anyone to perform, and reframes drag as something that belongs everywhere—even where it’s least expected.
FEED PICTURES
APPETITE FOR THE INTERNET
Dining table morph into extensions of internet culture, reflecting how social media, performative consumption, and digital behavior have infiltrated our most intimate rituals- where our eyes are often fed more and appetite is increasingly visual.
A long dining table replaces meals with images—photographs served on trays, framed and ritualised. This gesture mirrors a culture where scrolling replaces eating and documentation replaces experience.
Purpose
This chapter looks at what we consume before we even realise we’re hungry. It captures a moment in time
where looking has become a form of nourishment,
Feed Pictures is less about critique and more about recognition—an aesthetic pause to notice how quietly our habits have changed.
ONLY PLACE OPEN
A woman, dressed for the night before, sits alone in an old Irani café—the last place open. It is not indulgence but necessity. Not pleasure, but aftermath. Breakfast here is not aspirational or glamorous; it’s functional, nostalgic, comforting and honest. It becomes a pause point rather than a destination.
Purpose
This chapter celebrates the beauty of everyday rituals and places that ask nothing in return. It honors the comfort of familiarity and the quiet generosity of spaces that remain open—not just physically, but emotionally.
Only Place Open ends ATWB on a softer note, reminding us that even on the strangest mornings, there’s usually a table, a chair, and something warm waiting.
EAT, DARLING
At the centre is a Vada Pav, pierced with nails and a woman feeding it to a man. The phrase “Eat, darling” becomes both an invitation and a command. Offered as an act of care, blurring the line between feeding and harm, love and violence.
The gesture is theatrical, absurd, uncomfortable yet strangely tender and intentionally surreal.
Purpose
Nourishment isn’t always literal—the emotional language of food.
Eat, Darling explores care and affection through exaggeration.
We feed, offer and insist.
MEAL IS A PACK OF 20
Food itself turns hostile and ironic.
A Samosa acts as a packaging and reveals cigarettes instead of a usual potato filling—a visual joke about consumption replaced by habits, ritual by dependency.
The meal isn’t cooked, plated, or shared—it’s opened, lit, and consumed in pauses.
The pack is measured. Twenty units. Predictable. Repeatable.
Purpose
Meal Is a Pack of 20 fits into ATWB as a quiet visual switch—where the wrong breakfast isn’t chaotic or emotional, just cleverly disguised.
The meal looks complete. It only feeds something else.
