We all know the recommendations for a good night’s sleep: six to eight hours in a dark room, with as much silence as you can muster—preferably, on a large mattress, with 500-threadcount sheets, a down duvet for each season, and an orthopedic pillow.

For residents of the Western world, these things have become necessities: luxuries that we’ve convinced ourselves we deserve after a long, hard day at work. But for the world’s homeless —an estimated 100 million people—these things are simply out of reach. 

Having explored elements of the human condition through film before, filmmaker Dhruv Dhawan has spent years documenting Mumbai’s countless "street sleepers": men, women and children that sleep on the street’s of India’s largest metropolis.

Dhawan, born in Mumbai but now residing in Vancouver, has compiled a body of work on this subject called Mumbai Sleeping. Dhawan’s visual exhibit features still and moving pictures, and is being shown at the Blank Tank Gallery (148 Alexander Street) in Gastown until June 20.

Dhawan’s still images depict taxi drivers sleeping on the hoods of their vehicles, men resting their heads on drainage pipes or tightly wedged between curbs and vehicles, entire families sharing a single bed sheet, and children resting belly-down on the hard concrete of the Bandra Station platform as the morning’s first train pulls in.

In observing these still frames, one forgets to take into account the sounds that come with sleeping on the streets of one of the most densely populated cities in the world: dogs barking, people walking, and the constant hum of traffic and horns being honked. Dhawan’s 25-minute compilation of moving clips, shown in a separate room of the gallery, ties it all together.

“This exhibit in particular touches a somewhat universal issue in the world on the homeless and the issue of sleep,” said Anuj Singhal, curator at Blank Tank during a private viewing of the exhibition.

“When I first saw these images, I was very taken by the impact that they had portraying what life would be like sleeping on the streets. Even when you see it in real life, you don’t really stop to observe, and these pictures really capture that,” he said, referring to our city’s own often ignored homeless population.

With a similar and undeniable issue in Vancouver—evident just outside the doors of the Blank Tank, where I passed at least two people sleeping in doorways en route—both Singhal and Dhawan hope that the exhibit’s proximity to the Downtown East Side creates dialogue about what constitutes as necessity and extravagance.

“I think the way we sleep is with elements of luxury wrapped around it. We’ve taken a basic human need and fetishized it,” said Dhawan, who has plans to create a similar visual narrative in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.

The irony to both Singhal and Dhawan is striking: people entering the gallery to observe people sleeping, but not actually absorbing the sights within their own city.

But Dhawan insists that, rather than focusing on the assumed troubles possessed by those that sleep in the street, his work should force us to look inwards.

 “We are so oblivious to the narratives of the poor, or we impose our own narratives on the poor, which are often, “oh, it’s sad”, or “look how difficult that must be”, “look at the rut they’re in”, without actually spending time looking at it,” said Dhawan.

“I think that when we actually do that, we will see a lot more than something that is just sad… it’s amazing, it shows their resilience and their ability to sleep in ways that we never could. It forces us to turn the question on ourselves.”

Mumbai Sleeping is available for viewing by appointment only until June 20. A special screening of Dhawan’s 25-minute film and the accompanying collection will be held at 7 p.m. on June 17.

For more information, visit Blank Tank's website.