Earlier this week, the Turner Prize was presented amid a predictable whirlpool of chatter and bewilderment. The annual award given out to a British artist under the age of 50 years, is the rough equivalent of the art world’s Oscars, complete with a parallel, Razzie-style spoof prize, the Turnip. Rare is the year when the accolade does not draw hyperbolic declarations of the death of British art, but this year’s conversation is marked by genuine surprise, given that the winners are not artists at all. They are architects.
Assemble is a collective of about 18 twentysomethings who helped refurbish a group of derelict houses in Liverpool’s Toxteth area, in association with the community. For the exhibition that the nominees are required to mount in the days leading to the award, Assemble launched a little workshop, from where they retailed decor items like doorknobs, lamps and fireplaces, recast from construction debris.
The group now hopes to plough the £25,000 grant accompanying the prize back into their regeneration efforts for the neighbourhood.
If the Turner Prize jury leapt over a mental boundary to offer UK’s public a more inclusive definition of art, closer home, a corporate crossed a physical frontier.
The Piramal Museum of Art, housed inside a tower in Peninsula Corporate Park in Mumbai’s business district of Lower Parel, opened with an exhibition from the family’s enviable private collection. The impressive display, spread across 7,000 sq. ft. according to the press release, offers a quick walkthrough of modern Indian art history, from Dutch Bengal and Company paintings to contemporary classics. My favourites were “A Far Afternoon”, a festive Krishen Khanna mural of a Delhi wedding, and a couple of sparse Nandalal Bose woodblock prints. But it’s a real privilege to witness two SH Raza paintings, 50 years apart and completely at variance stylistically.
The museum has ambitious plans for the coming months, which includes talks and workshops and a rotating display of artworks that will change every quarter. It plans to remain open until late at night, when most galleries shut shop by 7 pm. There is no entry fee.
For these reasons, I hope the museum will get walk-ins beyond the employees who work in Piramal’s healthcare and realty departments in the same building.
I’d hate to see it turn into another Maker Maxity, Bandra Kurla Complex, with its ‘public art’ exhibits that are closed to most members of the public—at least those who don’t drive into the shiny complex and can get past the phalanx of security people. To be sure, there is a difference between the decoration of a corporate space and a display of art, accessible by everyone. Piramal Museum of Art seems poised to serve the latter category.
The writer is a freelance art journalist
The winners of the Turner Prize this year are not artists at all: they are architects
