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The Ma(r)kers of the City

Desire in the city of Mumbai and desiring the city of Mumbai are intricately connected in a Mumbaikar’s mind. Navjot Altaf, in her solo exhibition ‘Bombay Shots’ at the Guild Gallery, Mumbai presented a series of photographs- documented, categorized and technologically manipulated- in order to showcase the miniature fantasies of an average Mumbaikar, Amrita Gupta Singh reviews.

Twenty million people live in Bombay. Migration, multiculturalism, regionalism, vegetarian societies, Bollywood, alternative cinema and book fairs; festivals, bribes, money, power, desire, mobility, land, mafia, the Shiv Sena; the Sensex, local trains, crater-filled roads, urban sprawls and more make up what we understand as Bombay. The city and its combustible issues has always been a rich subject for artists, writers, film-makers and other creative practitioners. Navjot Altaf, in her latest photographic project, ‘Bombay Shots’ presented by the Guild Art Gallery, investigates the little histories and desires of the average Mumbaikar, across varied economic strata. The aspect of interactivity has been an ideological constant for Navjot, since the 1970’s, engaging with issues of the common man, where he/she becomes an active agency in the art-making process. Her collaborative interventions in Bastar with rural artists and various other interventions in urban spaces underscore her engagement with the role of art vis-à-vis society.

Conceived as an interactive process where the subject/spectator has some form of participation, Navjot worked collaboratively with five young artists and students,(Nyela Saeed: Artist, Sabrina Kalon: Artist, Sanchita Bose: Literature Student, Sriram: Cinematographer, and Chantale Nunes: Student) gathering information about the lives and desires of people of diverse locales and cultures, combining sociological research methods and candid portraiture. Each artist was asked to investigate the lives/stories in their localities and the micro-histories, the dreams, desires and notions of home and belonging. The massive migrations from other states as well as the internal migrations between suburbs, the demographic relations between the main city and the suburbs, and how the everyday lives of these people intervene in these shifts and mobility, opened up dialogical contexts of heterodoxy as well as outsider/insider ideological positioning. Interacting with various citizens at their homes or work-places, these ‘subjects’ were asked to name their favourite sites of the city against which they would like to be photographed; some were skeptical of the project while others participated enthusiastically.

These citizens were photographed in their own environment, and the sites selected by them were shot separately with the artist’s video photographer. Then, the still photographs and video images were transformed into individual projections of fantasy, via the Photoshop software. Via the semiotics of desire, layered narratives of the city emerged while also actively inscribing the Selfhood of the artist, in a multi-generational tapestry of what one would call the Bombay experience. These photographs gain substance via both the attentive realism of the compassionate portraits and the surrealistic departures from their material realities. The photographs will be sent to all these citizens who participated in the project, they will physically own the completed work of art, and their responses to this exhibition will be part of the next exhibition of Navjot, as an on-going interactive project. As Navjot opines “While talking and photographing people from different parts of the city one realizes the openness of Mumbai's populace, I don't think it's turning into an orthodox city; What is interesting about the process is to know about the places that people have a fascination for and like to go to. It is not predictable at all. It's very personal in most cases and there is a layered logic that one can't always figure out or question. The trips to all these sites have exposed me to the areas in Mumbai I would not have known or gone to otherwise”.

Via these narratives, multiple questions of what urbanism, development, progress and identity mean to its citizens come up in this exhibition. While most find sky-scrapers and bridges beautiful, (the Bandra-Worli Sea Link) others find natural habitats like the Sanjay Gandhi National Park refreshing. Many of the citizens liked themselves to be photographed against monumental colonial buildings such as the Gateway of India, the Taj Hotel, Victoria Terminus and Church-Gate stations, Crawford market or the High Court and of course Bandstand and not the equestrian Shivaji statues now installed at various places in Mumbai, symbolizing a grand Maratha past and right-wing orthodoxy. Some people also identified the Mahaslakshmi temple and the Haji-Ali, in specific relation to their religion, and this was where it became difficult for Navjot to maneuver these stereotypical fantasies, both as an artist and a citizen of Bombay, given its recent history of ethnic riots. Here Navjot chose a panoramic view of Worli, with Haji-Ali as a part of the skyline, or toned down the very Hindu architectural components of Mahalakshmi temple, while making the image of the citizen monumental against this backdrop.

Each photograph also has text splayed right across the middle, cutting the image into two (the split of the Self in the city?) which gives information about the identity of the person, and the relation to the site chosen by him/her. A lot of the color is also grayed out. Some of the portraits become parts of the billboards that advertising companies endorse, while others interact directly with the viewer, in idiosyncratic poses; each portrait opens out its own history and typologies of visual behaviour; they are of people we do not know, we ‘see’ them only via these images, it raises questions of connecting to the life of an ‘imaged person’; In an age of mass-media images, these portraits enter into the realm of symbolic interactions that define the synthesis of self, object and meaning, becoming historical documents of the average Mumbaikar and his/her miniature fantasies.