This work marks the first in Ronny Sen’s new series, The Sun Rises in the East, which will be presented as a solo exhibition at TARQ, Mumbai, in March 2026.

Winter 2045 in Bengal is unforgiving: the climate is erratic, and artificial intelligence has slipped into the hands of transnational criminal networks. A call from a Western photo editor sends Ronny Sen in search of a peculiar wooden dog, apparently the first synthetic analog learning machine ever built in the 1940s as a covert weapon system, in case the Nazis used the nuclear bomb first. The dog was designed to learn from its surroundings and serve any survivors of the so-called free world. It was deployed to numerous secret airfields newly built on the eastern edge of the British Empire for the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and the RAF. He travels to these sites, now abandoned for over a century, because the military-industrial complex must understand what happened to the first prototypes of these analog AI machines. Miraculously, he finds one intact, almost indistinguishable from a real dog, now a companion to a sixteen-year-old boy in the ruins. But the important question he faces is this: what has the dog really learned over more than a century, and what is it doing with this boy in the middle of nowhere?