Enough has been said, in both images and print, about Mumbai’s unique art deco architecture, second only to that of Miami’s in the sheer quantity of buildings displaying this style. But Delhi-based duo – artist Ayesha Singh and curator Reha Sodhi, in their show Ghost Lines , revisit this well trodden path with a fresh pair of eyes. Focusing primarily on columns housed in some of the city’s most iconic Deco-Saracenic and Indo-Saracenic buildings, Singh defragments the structures into basic elements of design, sculpture and geometry. The gallery’s tiny one room space is used well by the four graphite drawings (‘Hybrid Amalgamations’), two wrought iron installations (‘Ghost Lines’ and ‘Material Support’) and a screen playing a ten-minute video (‘Capital Formation’) on loop.
Tracking design evolutions
Sodhi’s first encounter with Mumbai’s art deco architecture happened, during her six months stay in the city, as curatorial assistant for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, back in 2014. So it was her obvious choice as a pitch to Mumbai Art Room’s Curatorial Lab programme, where she was picked amongst several applicants to be mentored by members of its new Curatorial Advisory Committee. The committee includes cultural theorist and curator - Nancy Adajania; Director, Tate St. Ives - Anne Barlow; Associate Professor, Department of History of Art, Cornell University - Iftikhar Dadi and Dr. Devika Singh from the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge to name a few. Sodhi’s pitch was to curate a show that revolved around art deco and other rich architectural styles in general, in Mumbai. “A long time ago, I really wanted to do a project to open heritage buildings to (the) public, which never happened…do an open day where the buildings and spaces, the heritage structures become accessible to public”, reminisces Sodhi, whose ingenious idea was eventually quashed owing to good old permission issues. So when a second chance to do something on the same lines arose, she instantly thought of Singh, whose work she was familiar with, having been colleagues in the past.
Singh on the other hand, currently studying sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, being passionately interested in post-colonial architecture was already working on some of these ideas presented in Ghost Lines . What initially piqued Singh’s interest were the Tuscan columns used in her childhood home, that she eventually realised felt extremely out of place in a Delhi home. Another disconcerting discovery was that of a huge 12/8 feet structure in Hauz Khas that housed a map of the area, but looked like it belonged elsewhere. The more Singh traversed her city, while photographing its streets or walking around, the more she wondered about hybrid architecture and how elements and features from different styles get appropriated and restructured to create something entirely new yet peculiar to its geographical location and culture as much as to the outside. “It’s a phenomenon that’s happening through the world, not just Delhi or Bombay…we are repurposing columns …based on our requirements…”, explains Singh, adding, “The forms might be similar but they’re not made from the same material…they’re not strong enough…they don’t serve the purpose that existed. We’re just constantly copying…just because they (things) look a certain way.”
Partners in design
The show, where Singh further extends and examines this phenomenon of “universalisation”, also followed a similar path of research. In this case though, it wasn’t Singh walking along the streets, but her close friends whom she assigned this wonderful task of exploration to. The brief given to them was to shoot images of columns within their own vicinities in Mumbai, en route to everyday destinations like their offices, homes etc. and send these images back to Singh, who then together with Sodhi collated and filtered out the ones which most interested them both. Along with images of various heritage buildings across South Mumbai, friends ended up sometimes sending across spaces that resonated with their personal memories and histories, but were actually historically quite modern.
Pulling out different features and ornamentations from buildings like Royal Opera House, Bombay High Court, The Asiatic Society and other private and commercial spaces, Singh in her four drawings amalgamates these, creating something wholly new while also de-contextualising them in the process. Bits and pieces of buildings one may have passed by hundreds of times now stare back at you like a faces of passers-by, familiar yet strange at the same time. For a Mumbaikar, this is another way of rediscovering one’s own environs and becoming more aware of what we see everyday.
Layers of design
The ten-minute video, shot by Singh entirely on her iPhone, tracks her hand as it moves across the surfaces of various columns shot across Delhi and Chicago – two cities that she currently calls home. As a viewer, you feel the coolness of the stone, gritty or smooth underneath Singh’s palm. Though intimate in the way it is shot, one is purposely kept ignorant of where which column is located, thus signalling the ambiguity that pervades international architecture today. “One layers into the other as such that you don’t know where you are,” reflects Singh.
It is this vagueness that gets further explored in the two other works. ‘Material Support’ is a wrought iron structure which resembles the outline of a column, sans the roundness and fullness of it. Singh’s column is more an airy, 2D version of its original; a pencil sketch etched on paper and then brought to life. The structure resting on the floor and moving right up to almost touch the ceiling of the gallery, is something that one can walk through and through – a feature that is patent to Singh’s work. The idea behind this gesture of welcome for audiences, is to walk through her creations and “be able to experience a drawing in a very different way”. The intent is that you start seeing these forms through a new lens, up-close and from within. Of the structure itself, Singh finds the moment where it “flattens, gets another form altogether…” the most exciting. She stands for a moment gazing at the shadow it throws on the wall across, admiring it for its ability to constantly transform as the viewer moves around it. Or within, as she’d like. Singh recollects the first time she exhibited her sculptural installation and how everyone out of habit and social conditioning stood around the work, refusing to interact in any other way but from a civil distance, till an artist’s child ran through the structure and Singh of course didn’t bother stopping him.
Expanding visual boundaries
it would be fair to say that art is constantly challenging the way we perceive things and respond or react to them. It pushes us to experience things which we restrict ourselves from, in both imagination and action. ‘Ghost Lines’, the second sculptural installation which lends its title to the show, also pushes the viewer to expand visual boundaries. As the column, similar to the earlier installation, revolves, it disappears while it gains speed. Sodhi suggests imagining a ceiling fan that does the same. In doing so, the object or the structure ceases to exist in the form that we know it as, while simultaneously accumulating volume and shape as it spins on its axis. These lines that we trace out, that help us in turn define what this thing before us is as we have been taught to recognise it - a fan, a column, a frame becomes nameless, invisible for those moments. And the lines, that once defined it, become ‘ghost lines’, traces of which we see, perhaps only in the mind’s eye.
Ghost Lines is ongoing at Mumbai Art Room, Colaba till February 28
