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Cities Under Siege

‘Urban Similes: Transforming Cities’ a show curated by Shubhalakshmi Shukla at the Project 88 has a an eclectic mix of young artists from urban centers and the show as a whole presents ‘Urban Age’ as a discursive field, says Amrita Gupta Singh.

For today’s Indian, the metropolis is a destination, where his/her dreams come true. And in trying to actualize their aspirations, the citizens of such metropolises shape the city, which in turn create environments that speak of multiple realities. Besides, cities are essentially cosmopolitan, a ‘home’ to individuals and cultures and have come to represent the global aspirations of many. The city is an icon of the twentieth century and a metaphor of a concept of progress, and ‘urban’ living becomes desirable and a marker of social achievement due to the connections between the city and potential wealth. With large migrations taking place, it is not surprising that the twenty-first century is being positioned as the ‘Urban Age’, where the concentration of populations will be in metropolises.

Simultaneously, a metropolis also witnesses and contains within itself, the major economic, political and social problems of our times, its many subcultures and conflicts of class, displacements and identity crisis. The first impression from a close observation of fast growing cities' dynamics is of chaos. In effect, all sorts of spatial events take place simultaneously without an apparent relation to each other. Pockets of rapid development occur in unexpected places, just to be abandoned well before the area is fully occupied; newly urbanized areas are incorporated to the city, although they can stay unused for years. The modern city is both physically and ideologically repressive, offering rational/functional spaces of living with no concerns to surrounding landscapes and ecosystems. The State, in the bid to meet global standards of living, invest huge budgets in development projects with suburbs emulating the centres, and we have phenomenon’s such as New Bombay, Greater Hyderabad, Greater Bangalore and the like, the shifts largely wiping out existing histories and dismantling social relations, where our neighbours are total strangers. 
The exhibition ‘Urban Similes: Transforming Cities’, curated by Shubhalakshmi Shukla, and hosted by Project 88, Mumbai, positions itself on the paradoxical paradigms of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of metropolises, where the ‘ideal imagined city’ versus the real is aesthetically dealt with visual texts that question what ‘growth’ and ‘progress’ would mean in the iconic cities of India. The artists live in various metropolises such as Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and pockets of Kerala. From the curatorial point of view, the exploration of the metaphor of ‘development’ vis-à-vis our lived environments is a compelling one, especially when projections of the city in the mass-media is largely glamorized. One can even see this erasure in the post-cards of Mumbai that are sold to tourists, where the ideal is located in the imaginary. The ideal is always of a ‘better past’ whereas today’s capitalist structures and explosive consumerism only serve as divisive instruments of power, and the development of ghettos.
Within the broad theme, the artists (a young dynamic eclectic mix) were given subjective freedom in terms of representational language to express their concerns, of locales in real time or imagined time. The dominant language that emerges is of painting, with some 3D sculptural forms. Images of loss of natural environments, mechanical living, middle class aspirations of security (the housing complex), measurable quantities of square feet of space and each granule of nature that is consumed in this obsessive ‘growth’, wastelands, encroachments, the images leave marks of the darkness of “civilizational debris and lost homes” the dystopian realities of the manufactured worlds of multinational corporations, of cities and societies under siege, of porous borders and divided selves, of impending holocausts.
Is everything about doom? Environmentalists think so, our ecosystems are on the precipice of destruction, global warming will wipe out animal species, while this obsessive-ness with mobility/speed will only destroy populations. This exhibition posits these important observations. I am not sure how art/cultural products in all its subversive strength or creative mystery can alter thinking processes, but isn’t it time for us, in our individual spaces, to review our roles vis-à-vis the environment?