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Battleground of Extremities

Jitish Kallat’s new exhibition ‘Sweatopia’ at Chemould Prescott and Bodhi, Mumbai once again deals with the trials and tribulations of a city that aspires to be a mega city. Amrita Gupta Singh however feels that the thematic intersections of poverty seem too glossy. Will these poor people featured in Kallat’s works ever live a life of dignity, given the endless migrations and displacements that globalization ensures, with the respective state governments unable to provide basic human rights to these peripheral presences, asks the author.

With the 21st century being hailed as an urban century and more significantly, a century of Asian urbanization, we could ask the question of  what is the ‘nature’ of urban life in a metropolis?. The analytical/theoretical framework of "global cities," where Dubai, Singapore, and Shanghai emerge as ‘models’, fails to be implemented in aspiring mega-cities, such as Mumbai. While global urbanism is sought through experiments of ‘inter-referencing’ whereby urban elites borrow, and articulate city-making across national borders, we find the phenomenon of slum demolitions, special economic zones, deployment of swanky architecture, mills and malls, and competition for professionals and foreign investors in the bid to create world-class economies. Such a production of space has profound implications for the future: to whom will the city belong? What will be the relationship between cities and citizenship? What is the ‘art of being global’ that is being cultivated in the megalopolis, here the site being Mumbai, the experiences of the migrant living in urban sprawls, who adds to surplus labour to global capital, while living within the dynamics of the urbanization of poverty and modalities of displacement. Globalization also accentuates a ‘new urban archipelago’ where massive consumerism amid deprived populations only serves to create divisiveness of economies, infrastructure and access to civil rights. Ideas of ‘participatory democracy’, ‘capitalism with a human face’ or ‘market socialism’ are being discussed to deal with such explosive demographic shifts, but in such a transitional scenario of the ‘within’ and ‘without’ of living in precarious socio-spatial systems of such mega-cities such as Mumbai, how do we understand our ‘place’ within the notions of power, politics of location, inclusions/exclusions and its imprints on the urban landscape and the life of the masses?

Jitish Kallat’s massive exhibition ‘Sweatopia’, showing simultaneously at Chemould Prescott Road and Bodhi Art, Mumbai, brings in his experiences of a ‘Mumbaikar’, the Mumbai streets which often double-up as battle-grounds of the extremities of existence, offering him multiple narratives  of survival and human struggle. The ‘sweat’ and grime of city life collates with the ‘utopia’ of an ideal world, in the title of the exhibition, and his social commentary are interfaces of local stories, politics, poverty, death and art. Utilizing images from the media and photography, Kallat’s pieces are large-scale, ambitious and present a very sleek portrayal of Mumbai’s grime. Is poverty so sanitized, certainly not, but given aesthetic transformations and cultural commodifications, one cannot help but confront such existential conflicts (here of the writer) in a gallery space.

Since graduating from the Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai, in 1996, Jitish Kallat has been widely recognised for his figurative paintings that often reference to pop art, billboards and popular culture with socio-political content drawn from the life of his own city, and news events. His practice has combined photography, painting and collage and has moved on to larger than life-sized sculptures and multi-media installations. At the Chemould Prescott Road, Kallat offers a grotesque skeletal auto (‘Autosaurus Triphos’) and a car (‘ Collindunthus’) with simulated bones that could be placed in a pre-historic museum of dead vehicles, panoramic visual fields  of a Mumbai street (‘Artist Making Local Call’) that articulate virtual accidents and aggression, scars, dents, marks on the body of cars (‘365 Lives’) that recall sudden forgotten deaths in a city that never sleeps, questioning the nature of urban life, and the multiple encounters in a single day/multiple time-frames in a single still image, involving the viewer in acts of reading, remembrance and reflection. Technically superb and visually seductive, Kallat places his artistic selfhood, via several registers of both the intimate/personal and epic/historic experience. Within the narratives of daily life lies the imprint of death, in the form of a twisted, absurd, macabre reality. A site of a slum demolition on Tulsi Pipe Road, (‘Cenotaph- A Deed for Transfer’) which wiped out homes and employment, gets reclaimed by walls built by the government on which film posters and bills get free advertisement space. The viewer receives the pressure to look at the images in a 3-D lenticular form, which has images of quaint domestic life, bereft of human presence, with the state-sponsored walls behind and as the artist says “every trace of aggression gets activated and levitates in mid-air as if they were vengeful festoons holding up the memory of a tragic demolition”. ‘Eclipse’ is another work which has samples of street food ‘examined’ in a radiology lab (Street food is a robust business, cheap and a source of sustenance for the masses in Mumbai, both blue-collared and working class). The plates of food assume cosmic dimensions, beyond the reformatory of civilizations, alluding to hope and life.

The show continued at Bodhi Art, and in contrast to the conceptual complexity and innovative usage of media at Chemould Prescott Road, the exhibits at Bodhi failed to stir and incite. The thematic spread was too literal in many ways (especially the drawings of the drinking of the waters of the Mahim Creek, which assumed morbid religious proportions in the public imagination in the recent history of Mumbai). An iconic sculpture of a street youth selling books (‘Eruda’) dominates the viewer at the entrance of the gallery. While it may be an image of hope and subverting notions of privilege, where is the desperation, the hunger, and the marks of horror that defines a human body on the street? There may be an element of camouflage that the artist employs via the serene expression on the boy’s face, and the symbols of the books and feet embedded in homes, which this class is totally deprived of by the state, but by just using black lead does not bring out the cataclysmic dimensions of street life that we (the privileged class) are only but mute witnesses of. If this piece could have been placed in a public space, maybe the psychological exchange could have been multi-dimensional. A sculpture of a one rupee coin interacts with lenticular prints (‘Death of Distance’) that speak of two dissonant narratives, one of the State, and the other of the poorest of the poor, becomes the ironic common factor between two variable India’s. An over-burdened flyover (‘Petromorphine-2’) wraps and collapses into a motionless circle, almost like a wreath mourning the tragic contrasts of this city. In his signature paintings, ‘Dawn Chorus’ placed on brass gargoyles (which allude to the colonial history of Mumbai), images of the city curl into the tangled hair of young children of the deprived class, who often form labour units in the tertiary businesses of Mumbai, their childhoods lost in the maze of survival. Will they ever live a life of dignity, given the endless migrations and displacements that globalization ensures, with the respective state governments unable to provide basic human rights to these peripheral presences?

Kallat does capture the pulse of Mumbai, the hope and redemption that share equal space with hunger and death, but it is just that the thematic intersections of poverty seems too glossy, but then art is an alternative investment in the capitalist economy, catering to a particular taste, so while I may be sounding like a moralistic grouch, the world goes on!