No place to Park…?

Abhijeet Tamhane

The open space in the BMP Building at Colaba is almost ideal for a hot summer afternoon. It is the building that houses Project 88, one of Mumbai’s gen-next galleries. And if you come by, your car candrop you right in front of the wooden door that opens into this godown-turned-gallery. It was not the scene on the April 21, though.

On April 21, people had to alight some 250 meters away from Project 88, and had no place to park their cars. Reason? The Vivan Sundaram opening!

The chaos tripled on this dual-venue opening and on the multi-opening evening. On the way, at Abhay Maskara Gallery, the latest addition to Mumbai’s alternative gallery-spaces, was the one-night preview by Jitish Kallat.

The parking woes and traffic blues of the entourage was soothed by the work on display. While Jitish showed his ‘Aquasaurus’ (familiar vehicle made of ribs and bones, if you have seen his ‘Autosaurus’), and Vivan brought vivid colours to the trash he has been documenting to enable polycentric reading of the economy. Vivan’s landscape-like  ‘Trash’ photographs and an evocative video that dwelt in the land of fantasy, rhetoric and reason  are to be seen at Project 88 . At Chemould Prescott Road, apart from the photographs, Vivan hose display his Hospital-like installation with beds made of ‘lost souls’ of sandals and sneakers, and an ‘ascension’ video that went ahead of Bill Viola’s video by the same name. The prelude to Vivan’s ‘Trash’ works, a two-screen video work that spoke of violence of the everyday, was also showcased at this spacious third-floor gallery.

A select crowd, of Dodiyas, Anant Joshi, Bose, Chintan et al visited these shows. Towards the end of the Chemould party, Jitish Kallat also joined. After all, he is an important Chemould artist. If you have any exceptions to this association that I spoke of, blame it not on me, but on the gallery system itself.

Notwithstanding the claims that the gallery system has emerged as compared to what it was five years back, the lists of artists represented by various galleries still overlap. It seems high-selling and conceptually well-articulate artists have a green-card to every known gallery. To an extent, for a curated show, it might sound okay. Yet, the sense of responsibility in representing an artist is missing in Mumbai-India’s art-gallery system.

Artists who fetch well, in terms of goodwill for the gallery, are seen at least with two or three (otherwise competing) galleries in town. Whatever logic of ‘win-win’ situations and collaborative co-existence might be applied to rationalize the scene, an insider would know that the galleries are not yet confident with their sets of artists, and artists are still open to the multi-centric representation.

The parking space in Mumbai which we were talking of, before we ‘chattered’ about two artists and three galleries, is scarce.  It is commonsense that if one vehicle has many parking spaces reserved, scarcity bites other vehicles.