Why would an outsider normally enter a Mumbai slum or low-income housing colony? To research: for decades, the homes of the poor, whether on the street or within tenements, have been popular sites for academics (and aspiring academics) to conduct studies and surveys. For charity: many NGO offices are housed in slums where they provide (or purport to provide) a plethora of services, from education to access to government schemes. To report: journalists sometimes arrive to document the “criminals” or the “heroes” of these localities (any other type of reportage is exceedingly rare). To be a tourist: there are well-known communities, like those in Dharavi where people can join guided tours or show up with their cameras.
But what if one was wary of all these roles? And yet curious about the state in which the majority of the city lives? How would one enter a place like Mankhurd, where thousands of displaced people live in one of the largest ‘Resettlement and Rehabilitation’ colonies? Would it be possible through art and discussion? Could one invite the public to exhibitions in Mankhurd? Or lectures? Or film screenings? Or gardening workshops?
This is the unlikely idea that is being proposed and enacted by the Mumbai Collective, Draft. On the 20 March this year, they inaugurated R and R, a new art space in Mankhurd that has hosted a few close-community events and is currently hosting Letter Opening , its first public exhibition.
Draft is a collaborative initiative between curator Gitanjali Dang of Khanabadosh and Christoph Schenker of the Institute for Contemporary Art Research (Zurich University of the Arts). They have seeded groups in nine cities with funds to make a proposal that provocatively adds to the current debate about the state of the public and art in urban environments. The Mumbai Collective comprises of Dang, CAMP (a studio currently made up of Ashok Sukumaran, Shaina Anand, Zinnia Ambapardiwala and Simpreet Singh), and the architect/artist duo Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty.
The importance of Mankhurd
It is important to understand Mankhurd — both visually and historically — to grasp what it means to rent a dilapidated old shed in the Lallubhai Compound, and turn it into a beautiful and open space.
This area is Mumbai’s ugly secret, where we send not only waste from our homes but all of our biomedical waste. This is where Asia’s biggest slaughterhouse has been moved to. This is where the thousands evicted from the streets during “clean up” drives are often sent.
The colonies themselves, the physical structures, have an apocalyptic air: dungeon-like squares forming an endless grid, a series of tiny flats that stand within peeking distance of the Deonar dumping grounds. The smell is pungent and particular on these streets, even by the low standards of cleanliness within the city, and garbage is strewn almost everywhere, filling the narrow alleys that divide the buildings. It is clear that this — this particular mode of existence — is reserved for the bottom rung of even the lower classes. Once you stand in full view of the rows and rows of dismal homes, the utter failure of the city to provide for its people, in societal and functional terms, becomes brazenly apparent.
This is what anyone visiting R and R must first see, must first engage with, before they enter the lofty and colourful room that hides behind a blue door in the Sindhu Housing Colony Building No. 21 (b).
There, they will find another layer between them and the works on display: the community.
R and R functions as a b alwadi (crèche) during the day, and they are in the process of creating a garden in the mud lane running outside the door where boys have taken to playing cricket. At any given hour, there are children of varying ages running amok, playing games, colouring or building things with yellow and green and purple plastic blocks. There is no attempt to create a quiet, gallery-like environment.
New art space
The exhibition is an eclectic and somewhat haphazard collection of 17 works that puts artists and activists on the same platform. It draws heavily on the development and displacement politics of the city, while also toying with the history of “the letter”. Folders of Right to Information demands by activists in Mumbai sit below photographs of demolitions in Golibar; the walls of the homes to be demolished are painted with revolutionary graffiti: Hum Nahin Hatengey , Builder Ko Hataengey . What may be the first letter by a Dalit woman effusively thanking the British for cracking the caste boundaries in India in 1855 is presented across from a letter from the grave (written by an aspiring job applicant), ironically announcing the worst resume ever seen in the history of resumes. A painting showing an old man in what may be his home, inscribed with a handwritten letter from a father to a student hangs on the bathroom door. The shelves lining the back wall showcase photos of drawings done by school children on the walls of classrooms in Rajasthan. Up the stairs, we find a list of Marathi words that have fallen out of use, printed and pasted in the corner. In the other corner, plays a short film Yours Faithfully , which gives a brief history of the professional letter writers of Mumbai that once held positions of authority and pride outside the post office and the courts.
About missives
Letter Opening is not just a play on the folded pages in the postbox. It also refers to the letter itself as character, the written word as knowledge, the open letter as a form of protest, the records of past letters as intimate worlds to be unravelled, but also historical documents of power. Seen together, it creates a conundrum for the viewer: what kind of histosries can we access through art? When and where and how should these be made available to the public?
There is no printed catalogue providing answers that is available. The makers of R and R leave us to fathom what we can on our own. What we are promised is more exhibitions and a permanent space to continuously access some of this material. Once the exhibition ends, a library that is currently under construction (and will presumably include some of the works currently on display) will remain open, and invite both contribution and exploration. It is not a static library but one envisioned as a dynamic place of production with translations, recordings, and other objects to be made in conversation with the books and journals that are being scanned and gathered.
CAMP, Gupte and Shetty — internationally and nationally prominent artists — share certain commonalities in their practice that are already becoming visible here: embedding themselves in the thorny intersection of politics and art, being deep in the field, creating engagements (with a place or a subject) over the longue duree, building things that have an amorphous shape. Even the name R and R — which refers to the resettlement and rehabilitation colonies and also to rest and relax, reuse and recycle, research and rethink, rock and roll — allows for a series of playful and serious combinations that will guide the many situations created under this roof in the coming months.
For now, the primary concern remains the claiming of this space within the community, while leaving it open for the community to claim.
Whether we, as the public beyond Mankhurd, will also come forward to make a claim remains to be seen.
Letter Opening is on till July 2, and showcases works by Kush Badhwar, Atul Dodiya, Awaaz-e-Niswan (Geeta Mahajan and Shahnaaz Shaikh) with Arif Shaikh and Neela Bhagwat, Ekta Rehvasi Seva Sangh, Gauri Gill, Himanshu S, Javed Iqbal, Jhelum Paranjape, Suhita Thatte, Smitalay, Maanvi, Pranali Garud, Priyamvada Jagia, Tarishi Verma, Vishal Langhthasa, Mithu Sen, Mukta Salve, Pash, Poonam Jain, RTI enthusiasts, Sanjeev Khandekar and Vaishali Narkar, Shilpa Gupta, Shreyas Karle. See aarandaar.net for details.
Alisha Sett is a Mumbai-based writer
The exhibition draws heavily on the development and displacement politics of the city
