What does it mean to love a city? Do you obsess over its quiet streets and nostalgic past, or do you look for it when you visit another?
Perhaps you play the observer, noticing the quiet moments in a melee, the greys amid the bright colours. And do you fill in the gaps with imagination so it all makes sense?
Two ongoing shows — Schon Mendes’s Cameos of a City at Sakshi Gallery, and Anita Dube’s Encounters with the City – Beloved at Lakeeren Art Gallery — contemplate what it is to locate oneself within a city.
An act of healing
In Encounters. .., Dube’s photographs tell us of a time when she came to Mumbai to meet a lover who didn’t keep the appointment. So Dube took a walk, and during that short span, fell in love with the city. Perhaps the dimly-lit night-time lanes of South Bombay and the succour found in the yellow-lit shadows and potted plants that frame the doorways of the ageing art deco buildings, helped walk away her disappointment. But after all, it is also the nature of love to allow us to be someone and do something we usually wouldn’t.
Dube, primarily a sculptor, found herself photographing the city as she trudged on. In that moment, photographing the city becomes an act of healing as much as it is of accepting things that have gone wrong.
Seven former ‘Delhis’
Also at Lakeeren is Sunil Gupta’s series Homelands that spans four years through New York, Montreal and North India (Rajasthan, New Delhi). What began as a project looking at landscapes — Gupta was an AHRB Fellow at the University of Southampton — slowly evolved into a conversation between the old and the new as he looked through the seven former ‘Delhis’. For this show, however, Gupta focuses on the remnants of the Mughal dynasty, and specifically the area that once was Shahjahanabad. The area, now known as Old Delhi, is the walled city that also includes Daryaganj and the Red Fort.
Homelands sees him juxtapose the present with the historical remnants of the city. An additional series posits two photographs from India, and one from homes Gupta has adopted in the West. It speaks of a sense of displacement, and to a larger extent, Gupta’s experience with HIV.
Having “caught a bug”, as he puts it, Gupta returned to India for this series after many years of living in New York and Canada. Though the shooting trip encompassed familiar places such as his hometown and school, and his father’s village in Uttar Pradesh, it was fraught with the stress of travelling with an immunity compromising disease.
Gupta went to parts of North India where, at the time, the HIV virus was spreading and the official control responses hadn’t really been put into place due to the nature of the disease. It suggests a time when modern India must have seemed ancient to Gupta.
Limitless wunderkammer
In contrast to Dube’s moody black-and-white images is Schon Mendes’s Cameos of the City at Sakshi Gallery. A series of colourful, busy and large canvases present the city as a limitless wunderkammer. Like the famed cabinets of curiosities, reality shares space with the imaginary. The time-worn, and the new and shiny are fitted into maze-like replicas of the modern Indian apartment or under a circus tent.
Situations of urban familiarity such as that morning moment when a milkman passes a sweeper on the street as a rickshaw idles around or men constructing yet another flyover, are placed with circus elephants on the loose or a Nazgûl (Nine Riders from the Lord of the Rings ) and his beast taking over the bedroom of a prone TV screen viewer.
Mendes’s is a view of the city as a collection of impressions, and an attempt to view these incredibly varied impressions as a whole, to understand how people from various demographics live in an invisible contract with each other and the city. The planes constructed across the canvas as platforms to place various objects, make the city feel like a living, breathing and expanding monster (but not all monsters are bad).
The invisible people
Mendes’s time spent working under the tutelage of Baroda-based artists Shibu Natesan and Rekha Rodwittiya is apparent from the invisible planes across which he plans his ‘cities’, and in the colours he uses to bring them to life. The invisible planes make it possible for us to see what we often don’t notice: the labourers, the watchmen, the rickshaw drivers, and the vendors. They allow us to locate the viewer in ways that make it impossible to ignore them. The artist from Goa, tackles not a specific city but the city as an idea, a melange of differences living in tacit arrangements and delicate balances.
The two shows not only speak of the idea of what is urban today but also what is comforting, and disconcerting about the city. But to have them do so simultaneously is a (possibly unintended) dialogue bound to give you a lot to think about.
The author is a freelance art writer
Cameos of a City at Sakshi Gallery till October 8. Encounters with the City – Beloved at Lakeeren Art Gallery till October 15.
