黑料不打烊

How does art simultaneously resurrect, invoke and deny location when that location is as multifarious as Mumbai? Raghubir Singh鈥檚 Victoria Terminus, insect screen vendor throws its brilliant blue net into the unwieldy city, hoping, in vain, to prise out some inherent part of it. We are faced with a similar task to that of Singh鈥檚 screen vendor, in the act of locating these works of art in order, in a sense, to locate ourselves, casting our nets out to the many elusive visions of Mumbai that are each constantly at work. The works in this exhibition speak to the gallery鈥檚 re-location by invoking the textures, tonalities, and motifs that give the gallery鈥檚 new space 鈥� at the fringes of land and sea 鈥� both roots and anchors. Rana Begum鈥檚 tonal studies verge on the encyclopaedic, invoking the tonal range of Bombay blocks of colour that both jostle against and spill into one another. Objects by Gyan Panchal and Prem Sahib each meditate on the interstitial, drawing vagrant, orphaned urban artefacts (the bamboo stalks, the neon sign) into the space of the gallery. Iftikhar Dadi & Elizabeth Dadi鈥檚 ceramic sculptures bestow a sense of formal permanence upon otherwise fleeting, plastic toys amassed across a number of sites in South Asia 鈥� Delhi, Lahore, Mumbai 鈥� performing the task of historically-conscious crystallisation, even as Monika Correa鈥檚 woven tapestries present the constant possibility of unravelling. In Nalini Malani鈥檚 animation, Now I See it Now I Don鈥檛, visions of the Gateway are briefly offered from the water before it is lost to a cacophony of strokes and waves. What鈥檚 Essential, Yamini Nayar鈥檚 eponymous photograph 鈥� showing a motley crowd of objects without hierarchy that range from the quotidian to the decorative to the totemic 鈥� calls upon the viewer to think across and between objects, materials, and spaces by embracing incongruousness and friction. Space, we are reminded by these and other works, is an ever-precarious assemblage; any presumed ordering of objects and their social lives is turned on its head. 

As the works speak to and across one another, a number of them encourage the viewer to partake in a codified outwards gaze. The onlookers in Vasantha Yogananthan鈥檚 An Ocean of Uncertainty partake in surveying the horizon for ships that come bearing the future; it is irresistible not to consider Simryn Gill鈥檚 Channel as forming the next view in Yoganathan鈥檚 series, transplanting us from the perspective of a bystander into the young men鈥檚 vision. In these varied depictions of the water, from Lionel Wendt to Michael M眉ller to Shambhavi Kaul, the sea is potent but ambiguous, looming over the works as an active author, indeed in much of the same way as it does for the city. Whereas for Roland Barthes the sea 鈥榖ears no message: but on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, signals, signs鈥�which are so many messages鈥︹��*, the sea in South Asia is richly legible. As Wendt鈥檚 photographs might suggest, for colonial subjects the sea is inseparable from a common memory of nautical colonialism 鈥� in the case of contemporary Bombay, the sea is an active site of labour, its signs and swells conversed with by fishermen, ferrymen, and dock workers alike. In the new gallery, as objects of art are interspersed with views of the horizon, we are reminded of the weight of the water. And so we float between land and sea, caught in the same transitory space as the gallery, as Paz on the ship, as the network of visions and views, outwards and inwards that are forged across the coastlines of Bombay.