The Maximum Trash(able) City
Shubhalakshmi Shukla visits the recent collaborative project of Neha Choksi at Gallery 88 Mumbai and says that the show has been successful in bringing out the pathos and courage of the migrant population in the city, who look at the viewer straight into the eyes.
My biggest fear after participating in Neha Choksi’s collaborative-show has been ‘All your conversations have been moved to trash’ like a redundant e-mail which is over after saying what it had to say! Although this could be a perpetual intuitive fear in the city of Mumbai for its constant demand for the ‘new’, there can be an attempt to look for what is forgotten even long back. How to bring it into play could be a context.
If memory appears like a paradoxical tool which consciously creates forgetfulness, given momentum by the speed of the city, Neha chooses to focus the edges of these transformations. She arranges emotions which are left behind long ago or even forgotten. In doing so she attempts to constitute something which touches upon the alienation and division that gets imposed on an individual in the speeded urban living. She attempts placing in context, the self-estrangement which has just begun, or is a process of ‘becoming’! Thus, amongst the narratives of ‘success’, could be an absurd sounding story, for human-completeness. A story where human integration could be achieved form ritualistic-trials both at practical and moral levels.
To question why one sees immense ‘trash’ in the city, which has to be perpetually overlooked, one may need a bit of philosophical self-introspection. It can be confrontational at times when the speed gets obstructed at the traffic- jams, and signals. A singular detail then could be deranging, to evoke multiple unresolved memories, one connecting to another, its collective form becoming personal!
Within those moments of stillness the mind’s eye may configure a displaced home of a village migrant who has not been able to get employed in the recently opened mall, a lost relative, or even a riot victim or such discarded hues of objects!
The title ‘Who’s in Town Anyways?’ takes a pick at the destiny of ‘off-season’/un-scheduled shows in the city’s art-galleries. The theme made relevant isn’t therefore about the absence of expected-viewers, but indeed about those who are coming into the city everyday as village- immigrants. What do they carry as their need and security, and what happens when a game like sequence planned by Neha and her collaborators venture into their refuge?
The show unfolds as an abstract-emotive elicitation of Neha and her team’s interactions with Mumbai city and its people; and is consciously made to be participatory. Manifested through real-objects, it constitutes a narrative of abstract nature created through ever-changing installation, performances, video-projections, and centralizes objects that connect people on diverse planes.
In the following text there are some readings as well as description which would unfold the abstract nature of the narrative.
Observation I
During the performance, the gallery-space got connected to the city-streets that must have leaded the visitors in here. The space seemed to mirror a rustic visual-arrangement of objects like ‘second-hand’ clothes, bags, mobile- phones etc. Inside the galleries this might have been a familiar experience earlier. In most such cases, the familiar objects from the urban or village streets get ‘sanitized’ in the process of becoming a spectacular art-object. Neha’s collaborative show marks a difference on this note.
She creates theatrical narratives through a game of exchanging things, melodramatic performance, with the help of seemingly discarded objects. The objects are however, not the discarded ones! They are collected from the people who have just arrived in the city of Mumbai, each telling one’s own story. She gives them her own color through a personalized memory.
Videos
1) In the video focusing Neha, she asks the visitors to give her all or at least one of their belongings. Her speech and posture in the video is formulated in two diverse kinds self portrayals making one as a request, while another a demand, suggesting her conscious need to shift from a benign to a ‘militant’ self or remain in flux! She collects from each individual visitor (in the gallery) one of their belongings which they would exchange in place of what they choose to pick up from the displayed ones.
2) In the three small monitors, the chosen new-comers in the city speak about their belongings they carried while coming to Mumbai. They detail on why these are precious for them, but agree to give away or exchange if it can be useful in any way. The explanation enhances the emotion when they describe the photographs as a very special memory of the person whose absence they carry (they absolutely refuse to give). The borrowed and gifted clothes by the relatives, friends before coming to the city reveal their dreamful imagination of the city!
The objects displayed in the gallery are these objects with which you may exchange with one of yours!
These short narratives become experiential as they start echoing a similar emotive aspect within the visitors towards ones own belongings. Neha mixes up the photocopies of the objects collected from the visitors along with those from the strangers in the city creating a silent statement about what makes them valuable for each? She writes phrases on these images, evoking memory as collective experience.
In the process of interaction, the visitors who picked up the object of their choice also write comments on the blank tags attached to each one of these.
3) The largest projection of video focuses a stranger, constantly looking down refusing to look up or speak while being aware of being watched. The camera creates an insisting prolonged gazing at this extremely shy and silent character, suggesting the possibility of immense irrational violence that surrounds a visible vulnerability. This may also be read as a missing expression in the city. The prolonged time period in the video also suggests the time given/taken to overcome, or device a concealing method by a façade of militancy, may be?
During the show Neha also writes letters to herself as someone else. She incorporates these objects and stories into her daily life, relocating these possessions, investigating them too.
Performances
- A young girl repeatedly emotes out ‘August mein hum yahan se nikal jayenge’ with her belongings scattered around her. While one walks into this performance- space, the chosen object in your hand gets connected to her scattered emotions and belongings. There is an eye contact with the performer, whose eyes start trickling down tears at that very moment; she repeatedly says the line still.
2) A man sleeps with his huge baggages, the space is entitled ‘No Loitering’.
3) An acrobat plays on a thick rope suspended from the ceiling. She comes down and rests in the tin trunk, wearing the sleeves of shirt onto her legs, sleeps and makes other erratic gestures. There are also many bags hung from the ceiling in this space. Along with runs a dragging recorded sound of conversation meaning ‘ the sun used to rise from this side and now it rises from the other side…’
Observation II
In Mumbai, what is absurd about these objects is that they are neither ‘beautiful’ nor suggest a high price tag. But what makes these beautiful is the way its need is described by beholder. Creating a sharp contrast to the association one may carry about one’s belongings in the city, these also create nostalgia.
One may say that Neha and her collaborators have a keen eye for the deceptive violence that proliferates in the city at various levels, of which the team is a part and parcel too. Thus, it is not just a keen observation, but also a sharp critique of seeking respite in material-growth as an ideal from of growth, which has challenged human relationships to quite an extent.
In recent times a lot more has been disturbing about Mumbai. One of them is the paradoxical ‘beautification-drive’, its consequences resulting in displacing a large number of village- migrants who work as hawkers. However, Mumbai will never stop being the dream of ambitious young immigrants, specifically from the villages whose dreams are as beautiful and pure as a failure.
Kisi ka Joota, Kisi ki daulat, kisi ka Love.. to kisi ki mohabbat.. down, down, down.. Meter Down!
The list of participants/collaborators in order of encounter:
Neha Choksi, Jyoti Dogra, Pramod Prajapati (on June 11) or Anil Sahu (on June 16), Arindam Ghatak, Faezeh Jalali, Rehaan Engineer (on June 11) or Karan Makhija (on June 16).
Gallery :Project 88, Colaba, Mumbai. 11.7.2007 to 16.7.2007
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