Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai is a public art project conceived and curated by the Mohile Parikh Center. Spanning over a year, it critically investigated the impact of consumption on natural resources in the city, and on human bodies, our ecosystems and cultures.

Field Notes is a culminating symposium that will explore the ideas of the public sphere, our ecological footprint, and our right to the city. It will discuss the processes and challenges of making art in public spaces and bring in forms of practice-led thinking.  Each day of the symposium will conclude with film screenings that examine our consumptive geographies and its impact.

Day I:

What is the Public Sphere?
Speaker: George Jose | Discussant: Noopur Desai

Ecological Footprint: Bombay/Mumbai
Speaker: Prasad Modak | Discussant: Prasad Shetty

Art Projects:
Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Archana Hande, Navjot Altaf, Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Anupam Singh, Prajakta Palav and Mansi Bhatt
Discussant: Rohan Shivkumar

Film Screening:
Wasted | Direction: Anirban Dutta

Day II:

Right to the City
Speakers: Hussain Indorewala and Shweta Wagh
Discussant: Shubhangi Singh

Art Projects:
Kush Badhwar, Parag Tandel, Sahej Rahal, Prajakta Potnis, and Justin Ponmany
Discussant: Shirish Joshi

Exercises in Imagination | Students’ Study Group
Facilitators: Amrita Gupta Singh, Shilpa Gupta, and Nikhil Purohit

Film Screening:
Watermark | Direction: Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky

The film program is curated by Avijit Mukul Kishore and Rohan Shivkumar.

This collaboration with the Sir J.J. School of Art within the framework of the public art project functions as a pedagogic intervention within an institutional space through an engagement with the faculty and students. This functions as a discursive program of two talks and two film screenings with accompanying panels over the course of September, culminating in the Mansi Bhatt’s public earthwork.

Art in Public Spaces
Speaker: Navjot Altaf
September 1, 2015 | 4.00 pm
Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai

What criteria should we use to evaluate art in public spaces that are dialogic, participatory, interventionist, collaborative and communitarian in nature? Since the 1960s, there has been much discussion among artists about ‘the public’, and varied experiments in the public domain sought to circumvent traditional art venues through direct interactions with the intended public. In this presentation, Navjot Altaf will engage with the students of the art school about such practices and its place in contemporary aesthetic discourse. Her methodology ascertains the interactive aspects of collaboration, whereby the work emerges out of extended dialogues, simultaneously altering the conventional relationship between viewers and works of art.

Navjot Altaf began her career in the early 1970s, after her graduation from the Sir J.J. School of Art. Over the last three decades, she has created an oeuvre which constitutes an ever-growing flow of video, sculptures, installations and site-specific works that negotiate various disciplinary boundaries. The artist works with musicians, documentary filmmakers, activists, general public and craftspeople. Since 1997, she has been collaborating with Adivasi artists and community members in Kondagaon, Bastar – Chattisgarh in Central India. She has shown extensively in India and several other countries at museums and galleries, including Fukuoka, Sydney, London, Liverpool, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Lisbon, Lille, New York, and other places.

Art and Performance
Speaker: Mansi Bhatt
September 28, 2015 | 4.00pm
Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai

In Performance Art, the medium is the artist’s body and connotes live actions that usually consist of time, space, the body, and a relationship between the performer and spectators. As a term, it is both confusing and fascinating, and falls outside the conventional forms of theatre and other performative practices. It implies a sense of the artist’s autonomy in composition, the work’s social critique, the element of endurance, and the difficulty to repeat the action. In this presentation, Mansi Bhatt will share her journey into the world of performance, which has its roots in the experimental practices she explored as a student in the Sir J.J. School of Arts, amidst her academic training.

Mansi Bhatt’s work locates itself within the world of performance and photography. The characters that she inhabits in her work are drawn from a combination of reality and fiction. Uncertainty of objects and characters and her constant inquiry toward ‘belonging’ are important elements to Bhatt’s work, as is the idea of ‘travel’. Her intensive performances employ her own body to convey multiple meanings, and the staging of the photographs are usually in extraordinarily elaborate tableaux, using prosthetics and makeup, through which she critiques societal norms, and claims new identities.

Luminous People
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Mechanical Love
Director: Phie Ambo

February 27, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Visitors Centre, CSMVS, Mumbai

Luminous People is a recreation of an event to commemorate the presence of the dead and the fading memories of the living, and of filmmaking.

Mechanical Love is a contemporary documentary set in what would usually be the futuristic landscape of science fiction. The film deals with artificial intelligence and human interface with life-like robots, which are designed as companions to human beings.

Both films talk of “human presence”, one in the context of the dead and the other of human machines. While the first film is a fiction drama made like a documentary, the second pushes our understanding of what we perceive as real. Between the themes explored in the films, the curators hope to open out a discursive space for conceptual ideas and imaginations concerning the relationship between nature and civilization, tangibility and abstraction.

Dharavi, Slum for Sale
Director: Lutz Konermann

April 30, 2015 | 4.00 pm
Colour Box, Dharavi Biennale, Dharavi

The second edition of the film program focuses on Dharavi. Speculations on its present condition and its possible future have led to a plethora of images and imaginations emerging from government organisations, private developers, non-governmental organisations and community groups. This has created a geography of desire and aspiration that shapes the imagination of the local communities.

Lutz Konermann’s documentary film focuses on the redevelopment proposal created by Mukesh Mehta, urban planner and consultant to the Dharavi Redevelopment Project. It follows the urban planner through the processes of state approval, and also documents the lives of the people in Dharavi as they access the impact the project. The film questions the very nature of development on homes and livelihoods, against mounting pressures of globalisation and capital.

Leviathan
Directors: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

June 30, 2015 | 5.30 pm
The Hive, Mumbai

The third edition of the film program is at The Hive, a community space located in Chuim, a fishing village in Khar. The film Leviathan (2012) takes us to another fishing community in New Bedford (New England) that formed the background for Herman Melville’s literary classic ‘Moby Dick,’ a story about a man and his obsession with a whale.

Leviathan is set on a fishing trawler in that context. Using many miniature Go Pro cameras attached to almost every conceivable part of the ship, the film creates an unreal universe and makes us identify with not only the human, but also every animate and inanimate part of that experience. Edited together into a non-linear and virtually wordless whole, we are plunged into a dark hallucinatory world where the sea rages, the wind blows, half-dead fish lie on the ship’s floor, and seagulls fly overhead for the dead fish on the deck. Boldly experimental and challenging, the film is a kinetic, spectacular work that bridges the gap between academic research and aesthetic experience.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel from the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University attempt to create a new way of understanding people and culture through interdisciplinary methods that combine the arts, the natural and social sciences, and the humanities.

To Let the World In | Volume 1 and 2
Director: Avijit Mukul Kishore

September 2 and 3, 2015 | 4.00 pm
Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai

The fourth edition of the film program is at the Sir J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai, and will respond directly to the space by focusing the discussion around the nature of art practice and the role of the academy. The aim is to open a discussion with the students of the art school on the shifts of art practice over the past two decades, and the increasing prominence of Indian art and its transformations of practice and consumption.

To Let the World In (2013) is a two-volume film project by Avijit Mukul Kishore in collaboration with Chaitanya Sambrani, that looks at a significant period in the history of contemporary Indian art from the early 1980s to the present day. It features three generations of celebrated Indian artists who share recollections, reminiscences and concerns about their practice. The film is based on the show titled ‘To Let the World In: Narrative and Beyond in Contemporary Indian Art’, curated by Chaitanya Sambrani for Art Chennai.

Day I: Film Screening | Volume I (93 mins)
Panel Discussion | 5.30 pm to 6.30 pm
Atul Dodiya and Avijit Mukul Kishore
Discussant: Noopur Desai

Day II: Film Screening | Volume II (52 mins)
Panel Discussion | 5.00 pm to 6.00 pm
Archana Hande, Shilpa Gupta, Kausik Mukhopadhyay and Rohan Shivkumar|
Discussant: Noopur Desai

Wasted
Director: Anirban Datta

January 8, 2016 | 5.00 pm
G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture, Mumbai

Ancient agrarian India believed nothing is waste. No Indian language has a word for waste. This concept was born with the industrial revolution and brought by colonial history upon an agrarian culture.Waste has now become a currency of development. ‘Wasted’ is a personal accord vis-à-vis India and the mountain of waste it produces as an aspirational economic giant.

This film was conceived around events that unfolded on the fringes of its primary subject. The loss of a dear friend prompted the film maker to reflect on life itself and his practice as a documentary film maker. The film tries to look back at material shot for his previous films and tries to use them as found footage.

Watermark
Directors: Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky

January 9, 2016 | 5.00 pm
G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture, Mumbai

Watermark is a feature documentary that brings together diverse stories from around the globe about our relationship with water: how we are drawn to it, what we learn from it, how we use it and the consequences of that use. The film visits the massive floating farms off China’s Fujian coast and the construction site of the biggest arch dam in the world – the Xiluodu. It examines the barren desert delta where the Colorado River no longer reaches the ocean. It witness how humans are drawn to water, from the U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach to the KumbhMela in Allahabad, where thirty million people gather for a sacred bath in the Ganges. It speak with scientists who drill ice cores two kilometers deep into the Greenland Ice Sheet, and explore the sublime pristine watershed of Northern British Columbia and reflects on the water-intensive leather tanneries of Dhaka.

Watermark is shot in stunning 5K ultra high-definition video and is full of soaring aerial perspectives, immersing the viewer in its images.

Curators:
Avijit Mukul Kishore is a film-maker and cinematographer based in Mumbai. He works in many genres of film and video making, and is actively involved in art, cinema and cultural pedagogy. He is co-curator at the FD Zone programme of Films Division India since its inception in 2012.

Rohan Shivkumar is an architect and urban designer from Mumbai and is the Deputy Director of the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies. He is interested in exploring cross disciplinary ways of reading and representation of cities.

Production and consumption are deeply connected to processes of urbanization, their conditions and consequences. Across the 20th and 21st centuries, there has been a proliferation of urban areas across the globe. But has this urban turn, concentrated to cities, contributed to human well-being? It is in this context that the public art project, ‘Geographies of Consumption’ is conceived to critically analyze the ‘space’ and ‘place’ of consumption in our lives.

Participating Artists: Kausik Mukhopadhyay, Archana Hande, Navjot Altaf, Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Anupam Singh, Prajakta Palav, Mansi Bhatt, Kush Badhwar, Parag Tandel, Sahej Rahal, Prajakta Potnis, and Justin Ponmany

Study Groups: February to April, 2015

1. Orientation Circle with participating artists, architects, urban researchers, and social scientists
CONA Foundation, Mumbai
2. Study Group: Water
Facilitators: Ekonnect Knowledge Foundation, including experts from the Water Supply Department, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), and Econ Pollution Control Consultants
3. Study Group: Land
Facilitator: Collective Research Initiatives Trust
4. Study Group: Food
Facilitator: Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA), Mumbai

NB: The study groups on water, land, and food were held at the Academy of Fine Arts and Craft, Rachana Sansad, Mumbai

Public Art Projects:

Isles Amidst Reclamation
Artist: Ranjit Kandalgaonkar
July – December 2015 | Installations
Library, Bombay Natural History Society and Research Room, Department of Archives, Mumbai

This is an interactive installation at public libraries/archives in the city, showcasing research methodologies to undertake a ‘detective-style’ exercise uncovering reclamation stories. The libraries and archives imagined to be part of this interactive exercise that will form a sort of closed-circuit route to locating data relevant to following a ‘strain’ or ‘thread’ of research. Each of these institutions are close to each other, and an interested user can engage with the starting point of the narrative provided at any one site to take it further, either at the same institute or nearby. Although, for a researcher, closeness of locations via a site or a person, a book or an institute in order to quickly follow up leads is usually never the case!

For the installation, reclamation history is being accessed from all the archives/ libraries in the vicinity of the archives/libraries and the research seeks to revisit the physical sites where reclamation took place. The reclamation history of the city usually began with a localised need for land reclamation, i.e. a need to solve a local issue for a certain problematic area.

This localised reclamation inadvertently triggered reclamation over a longer period of time, (300 odd years); a protracted event that changes the geography of the city. For e.g., in the case of the Breach Candy reclamation, or the Great Breach, the need to ‘solve’ the issue of low lying land being flooded by high tide water and subsequent health and sanitation issues led to a long term reclamation that quickly (due to its apparent increase and availability of new land parcels) spread to other parts of the city.

This usually occurs due to the reasons put forth by the governing bodies such as accidents, mishaps, inconveniences to the city’s running within its then poor infrastructural set up, and the city’s dire need to improve said conditions. Another instance; the channels of water between the Old woman’s island and Bombay isle was a contentious area because boats were capsizing in the narrow channel between the two isles. It was deemed a hazardous town-condition, plus there was a need for better connectivity between the two isles. So there was a need to build a causeway by reclaiming land to ‘solve’ the issue.

The water’s edge at which the marine ecological ecosystems were disturbed are the consumed scapes where we seek to investigate what transpired in terms of the reclaimed land history of the archipelago. Reclamation very obviously disrupted the fragile ecosystem in and around these areas. One of the main aims of the interventions hope to highlight our still current obsessive drive in reclaiming land parcels from the seas, for the sake of creating ‘smart cities’ or warped ideas of infrastructure building at the expense of a sensitised approach to city development.

Game Over Company
Artists: Archana Hande and Kausik Mukhopadhyay
September – December 2015 | Workshops and Website
Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi of Architecture and Environmental Studies (KRVIA), Mumbai

There was a big change after 1992/93 in the geography of Bombay. The city became divided on the lines of religion, physically and psychologically. Cities are not homogeneous entities. They are divided along class, caste, religion. However, we only notice a division when it is stark. What led upto the 1993 events has a long history. But this history is the history of the interpretation of history itself. As one set of historians, interprets history of India as a place for many religions, races, caste, another group has a narrower interpretation of India as a place primarily for Hindus. The latter interpretation gave rise to ideas of a mythic golden age and an enemy, on whom it could blame its destruction. This history has little scholarly presence but it produces an effective ideological indoctrination. Some time ago these voices were clearly distinguished as the voice of certain political groups, propagated though rallies and their mouthpieces. With the coming of internet that distinction has become blurred. Especially within social networking sites, with the anonymity of writers, this voice seems to become the normative. Just the volume of posts, responses and repetitions takes the place of evidence, reason and logic.

As the landscape of the city changes with new ghettos and strict vegetarianism, free speech is subdued with violence. The mythical history feeds more indoctrination, consumed hungrily at a time of all round hopelessness, a vent to the anger and an illusion of a better future. As I have mentioned earlier, the anonymity of the internet makes it look like the public opinion of masses even though it can be engineered and orchestrated by interest groups. It would be logical to work in that space as public space and use the social network sites to our advantage. History seems to be a matter of interpretation with no truth value to it. Anything is possible, as if it is a virtual game where reality gets transformed through the lens of wish fulfilment. Time, events, characters gets unhinged and arranged by the players.

As a part of Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/mumbai, we would like to make a website of game proposals. These games act as provocateur and displace the prevalent belief on the Net. Generally games are programmed to win if certain tasks are performed and depend on the skill or speed of the player. Here the result is confused/ negated depending on the condition chosen by the player. The game proposals are in form of drawings, animations, text. They are like previews of short versions of games. Anybody can comment, edit, add games to the website. Also, it will have connection to social network sites for propagation. The games will be designed with students through workshops at the KRVIA, Mumbai. Our games of history are an attempt to subvert the other history to regain the terrain with satire, humour and wit.

Amphibian’s Transit
Artist: Mansi Bhatt
September – October 2015 | Performance and Earthwork
Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai

Amphibian’s Transit, the performative earthwork at the premises of the Sir J.J. School of Art, is an extension of Bulldozer Yatra (2012) where the artist threads the act of digging land to ideas of labour, living and consumption. Through this performance, she enters into the worlds of land and water, assuming the character of an amphibian, who visits memories and dreams to find another place to live on earth. Here she imagines new geographies and manners of evolving, excavating into unknown territory like a vulnerable creature, and enduring the process of labour.

The space within the art school allows her to explore the multiple histories that this heritage territory embodies. The act of the performance is a concentrated process of digging for three days, in a search for imaginary belongings, unfolding stories of the three worlds she read as a child, her body travelling through space and time.
With used workers’ tools, the performance began through making a crack (about 4 inches), and then broadened to accommodate the artist’s body to a length of 8 metres. The outcome on the last day was a sculptural form of accumulated soil, which poetically evokes a ‘Home’. The act itself is ‘the archive’ of human transit.

Wreckage Point
Artist: Parag Tandel
In collaboration with Children of the World
Collaborators: Kush Badhwar, Minal Damani, R.B. Holle, Kadambari Koli, C. Ganacharya, Shubhangi Singh, Nikhil Purohit, and Apurba Nandy
August – December 2015 | Workshops, Video, Sound
Rekonda Quarry, Navi Mumbai

Observing the changing landscape at Thane, which is situated between two mountain ranges, Parsik Hills and Yeoor Hills, the artist visited the site several times to document the landscape, but was not allowed by local developers given the mining activities. In his project, he collaborated with an NGO to teach art to the children art of the workers at Rekonda Quarry through free activities. The children belong to the low-income migrant workers of the quarry, and the project focuses on site-responsiveness and public engagement through painting and sculpture workshops, sound, performance, text and video exercises. Stepping away from authorship, the artist allowed for the flow of ideas with a community that has no relation to art, and worked with the dichotomy of a once mountain/now quarry, and the politics of production and consumption in the frenzied city.

Konkan Nagar, Bhandup
Artist: Prajakta Palav
June – October 2015 | Paintings, Photography, Treks, Workshops, Wall Drawings and Exhibition
Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai
Konkan Nagar (Bhandup), Mumbai

Konkan Nagar is a vibrant home-grown neighbourhood in the suburb of Bhandup, which evolved since the 1970s. People migrated from the Konkan coast to work in the textile mills of Bombay, and made this hill their home, bringing in their forms of community and cultural life.

Usually termed as ‘slums’, empathetic sociologists and urban researchers call these neighbourhoods “which include many of Mumbai’s urban villages (gaothans) whether they are gentrified are not. They were developed gradually, by the people who live there, with the help of local artisans of construction, usually with little or no support of the authorities. They belong to another history of urbanization, one that is as universal and ubiquitous as the skyscraper, only much older”.

The artist is attached to corners, both in the home and the city. Konkan Nagar is a corner in the grand narrative of the megalopolis, and is a model of a sustainable neighbourhood built by the community. Over the last two years, the artist has been exploring this neighbourhood through walks, conversations with the residents, photography, paintings, and projects with students from the Academy of Architecture, Rachana Sansad. Palav shares her practice with the residents, and find Konkan Nagar to be a site that offers innovative keys to urban spatial problems.

The artist connects this space to her origins, and her paintings of Konkan Nagar are experiential in nature. With such spaces falling within the grid of the real estate industry, my project is contextualized around the loss of such home-grown neighbourhoods in the future.

Ecologies of Rivers, Flows in the Body
Artist: Navjot Altaf
September – December 2015 | Walks and Video
In collaboration with Ekonnect Knowledge Foundation

It may come as quite a surprise to many of us who live in Mumbai that this city actually has four rivers flowing through it – – Mithi, Dahisar, Oshiwara and Poisar rivers. The reason for this ignorance could well be because these rivers fail to resemble rivers today, they appear more like sewers, which we prefer keeping a distance from. It is this lack of awareness and interest in our rivers that is causing them to deteriorate into an even more pathetic state with every passing day. All of Mumbai’s four major rivers originate in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Borivli. And, it’s only within the park that the rivers are relatively clean. They begin to get polluted as soon as they exit its protected environs and enter the city. Flowing through its industrial, residential and slum areas fills them raw sewage, industrial waste and municipal waste. An RTI was filed by river activists to find whether the rivers are still listed as rivers or have become gutters officially. Thankfully, they are still rivers!

Since antiquity, philosophers and architects have seen cities as human bodies, with arteries and veins through which people and traffic flow. In this project, I see the imagery of rivers in the city to resemble the flows in the human body, with intricate tree-lie formations in the lung or veins and arteries carrying blood from the heart to keep the body healthy. Looking at the state of the four rivers and how water flows are polluted, The artist sees the city in a medical ailment with rivers having turned into sewers. In the project, the artist will have discussions with medical doctors to understand how the body functions when arteries are clogged and people resort to angioplasty/other treatments or face heart attacks. She will collect material of medical scans and video reports from a hospital, and also from the Internet. With this imagery, she combined the video footage collected through her walks along these four clogged rivers of Mumbai with images of natural forms to create a video, including interviews with Prasad Modak of Ekonnect Knowledge Foundation. The rivers are dying, and the city will see increasing floods in the future since the routes of these rivers are choked with infrastructure projects. Along with climate change and rise of sea levels, Mumbai is in a fragile situation which the planners refuse to acknowledge. The project will raise questions regarding this context.

Bhramana
Artist: Sahej Rahal
November – December 2015 | Performance
Vasai Fort, Mumbai

The history of Bombay/Mumbai is fascinating and for this project, Rahal takes an account of this history with the site being Vasai Fort in north Bombay. The present day name of Vasai originates from Sanskrit, Sanskrit word “waas” meaning dwelling or residence. The name was changed to Basai by Muslims who occupied Vasai before the Portuguese. The Portuguese named it Baçaim. The Marathas renamed it Bajipur. The British named it Bassein and today it is called Vasai. The most significant past in Vasai’s history is the reign of the Portuguese for 205 years. Historically, the entire region has attracted traders and merchants from Rome, Greece and Middle East. In 1295 AD, Marco Polo visited Thana/Vasai area.

In the second half of 16th century, the Portuguese built a new fortress enclosing a whole town within the fort walls. This fort stands till today with the outer shell and ruins of churches. This is the site of the artist’s performance, with the fort as the liminal space of land and the sea, a geographical site with its global port history of trade, profit and power.

Bhramana is a series of ongoing performances; each performance is different from the previous one and performed in a different space. The idea behind the “Bhramana” performances was exactly this—to test the potential for myth-making within the city, especially in its transitory spaces where the narrative of the city, rife with tensions, plays itself out in real time. In Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai, the artist will perform the fourth in this series, , which is something like a wandering, spiritualist act in a historical fort. The characters are influenced by Paganism, Shamanism, mythology and even Anime – quite a patchwork! Joseph Beuys and his Shamanistic acts are major references.

With his performance pieces, often it is about negotiating space – public space – and identifying their layered history with my imagined characters and their interaction with people in the city. I fashioned a musical instrument out of PVC pipes and branches, which is played in the performance. Through the character of a ‘Nomad’, the artist invokes the wanderer, and the philosophy of ‘nomadism’ that counters the notions of geographical space, territorial production, identity, and power is the core of these performances. His performance is a philosophical encounter with the ideas embedded in this project, particularly of Bombay/Mumbai.

Mumbai Hyponatremia
Artist: Anupam Singh
October – December 2015 | Installation and Film
Vasai Vikasini College of Visual Arts, Mumbai

The desire of working and living in this city is one of the principle factors which make Mumbai one of the most densely populated cities in the world. With Mumbai having less than 0.03 acres per 1,000 people—the lowest in the world, the demands for housing and related infrastructure are increasing every single day. Hence, the state government along with various housing development authorities is constantly looking out for land to execute various housing schemes. The ‘From Hutments to Tenements’ policy seems to an answer to the city’s crisis of land for building houses, that envisages resettling Mumbai’s slum-dwellers in housing projects that could be developed on the 2,700 acre expanse of salt-pan land in the city. The state government has zeroed in on 400 acres of salt pan land along the Eastern Express highway in Mulund to relocate slums from central government land under Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) scheme.

On one hand, where this SRA housing project on salt pan land in Mumbai looks quite lucrative and an easy option to address the land crisis in Mumbai, on the other hand it raises questions about the price the city might have to pay for such projects. Both citizens and the environmentalists have expressed their concerns over this matter. According to activist, Cyrus Guzder, Mumbai is vulnerable to storm surges where a combination of high winds and high tide could lead to a rise in sea levels. Mumbai Hyponatremia will be an intervention that will closely look at various aspects of these lands and understand the impact of the future developments will have on the environment as well the city of Mumbai. My project will be in a way an artistic archive of these lands, exploring and mapping the landscape through ground research into the biodiversity of these lands, geographic location, history and cultural practices of the sites.

With the difficulty of gaining permissions, the main intervention will be located at the Vasai Vikasini College of Visual Arts as it is located surrounded by active salt-pan lands. After an artist’s talk at the college, thirty students will be enrolled to collaborate with the artist. This will be followed by ground research and interviews with salt-pan workers and the manager of the site. Video documentation of the site will be conducted, whose footage will be used in the final film. The film will be screened on a 10 feet/8 feet screen made of canvas cloth installed in the premises of the art college. Salt will be collected from the surrounding sites, and filled in plastic pouches and questions on paper on open spaces and development policies will be inserted in the pouches. These pouches will be pinned to the screen over which the film of 16 mins will be screened at the site.

Geographies of Production
Artist: Kush Badhwar
October – December 2015 | Film

The artist was predominantly in Hyderabad through the duration of this project which focused on Mumbai. Rather than returning to Mumbai to hurriedly immerse himself into the site-specific, he wonders about the possibility to utilize his distance to explore another dynamic of the project. For the last year or more, Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai has served as an instigator and container for a variety of ideas, dialogue and action related to the politics of water, land and food (and more, he believes) in the city. There is an ecology to the project itself, in the bonds that have or are being formed and the traces that have been produced and consumed from these bonds. He is interested in this container — its properties, its in/abilities, what goes on inside, and its potentials.

At the outset, he proposes to focus on material that exists in and around the project: research matter, images, sound and text extending to the sites, projects, and collaborators involved with Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai. By way of interaction undertaken through this focus, he hopes to collate such material. Further, this material may be re-imagined or new material may be collaboratively imagined or generated.

After this stage, he sees a constitution of this material forming an artwork, likely to be in the form of a video-piece or printed publication, which could be showcased at the project symposia and further platforms later. The collected/generated material could also be made available to all involved or the wider public, which we could discuss as the project progresses.

Handbook of Brief Recipes
Artist: Prajakta Potnis
December – February 2016 | Interviews and Performance

Brief Recipes, which deals with the food histories of the city, the meat bans, and threat to traditional recipes in the face of the homogenization of food, the artist collaborated with AuthenticCook , which works with women who preserve traditional recipes in diverse communities and contribute as home chefs to AuthenticCook, inviting people to savour, remember, and share stories of foods under threat. Her performance included sharing stories of food on the local trains in Mumbai from Churchgate to Vasai, through conversations that occur in everyday travel. The final outcome will be a handbook of brief recipes found in Mumbai, tracing its histories of migration and food.

Entrée
Artist: Justin Ponmany
April – May 2016 | Performative Drawing Actions

Through walks and performative drawing actions, the artist collaborated with students in the form of an outdoor study along a road in Khar, where there are a number of sick and cut trees. The students sat at different places along this road drawing and documenting the space, while subtly addressing the politics of nature and culture in the city.

January 7, 2015 | 6.30 pm
Space 118, Wadibunder Road, Mumbai

Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai, is a public art project conceived and curated by the Mohile Parikh Center. It critically investigates the impact of consumption on natural resources in the city, and on human bodies, our ecosystems and cultures. Interspersed in the project are study groups, screenings, public lectures, annual symposia, and publication.

It is a platform for diverse actors to discuss our ‘rights to the city’, igniting socially innovative ideas to enable a more farsighted approach to the environment in Bombay. Artists, geographers, urban researchers, architects, social scientists, environment management experts, students, and grass-root civil society organizations are encouraged to collaborate on creative projects for the city. Through the lens of urban consumption, fifteen public art projects will focus on the themes of Land, Water, and Food.

Production and consumption are deeply connected to processes of urbanization, their conditions and consequences. Across the 20th and 21st centuries, there has been a proliferation of urban areas across the globe. But has this urban turn, concentrated to cities, contributed to human well-being?  The panel discussion will explore these questions through an interdisciplinary format, as a launch to the project.

Shantanu Roy is Senior Vice President at the Environmental Management Centre LLP, Mumbai. His blend of experience with academic and research institutions, private sector and financing institutions, and governments has provided him with a synergistic approach to environmental management and sustainability. He is associated with the Ekonnect Knowledge Foundation, in its Green Purchasing Network India program.

Navjot Altaf is a senior artist whose oeuvre constitutes of multidisciplinary approaches to video, sculptures, installations, and site-specific works. She continues to collaborate with indigenous artists and community members in Bastar, Chattisgarh, since 1997. Her imagery is drawn from her theoretical and methodological innovation, and engaged readings of historical and contemporary art, film and cultural theory.

Rahul Srivastava and Matias Echanove are the co-directors of the Institute of Urbanology, based in Mumbai and Goa. The institute engages with debates on urban development by working with local community groups, creating new concepts, implementing projects and recommending strategies and policies.

Amrita Gupta Singh is an art historian, researcher, and writer involved in art education and cultural management. She is Program Director at Mohile Parikh Center, Mumbai.

April 20, 2012 | 6.00 pm
Studio X, Kitab Mahal

Opening Spaces in the City: Sites/Contexts/Dialogues is an open discussion that will unravel the curatorial ideas and individual art interventions of the public art project [En]counters: Land of Mine, co-produced by the Mohile Parikh Center and ArtOxygen from January 7 to 15, 2012. This project explored the relations of land to the city of Mumbai delving into notions of home and belonging, landscape and territory, space and identity, borders and sharing, heritage and ownership.

This discussion will coincide with the opening of the exhibition Trespassers Only (organized by ArtOxygen) which is an extension of the collaborative public art project positioning art as an agency to engage with social issues, urbanism and the city. The exhibition will be interspersed with workshops, walks and film screenings.

Exhibition Preview: April 20, 2012 | 6.00 pm
Workshops: April 21 and 23, 2012| Participating NGO: Community Outreach Programme (CORP)
Documentary Film Screenings: April 28, 2012 | 2.00pm onwards | Open to the public

• Garbage Warrior (2007) | A Film by Oliver Hodge
• The Fluid City (2011) | Edited by Kavita Pai
• Land(of)Mine (2012) | Edited by Kavita Pai

Water plays a paradoxical and contradictory role in Mumbai. Both scarce and abundant, it surrounds the city and is a vital part of its landscape; yet most people have limited or no access to it. Contested debates circulate whether water is a private commodity or a public resource, with the urgent need to manage our ecosystems in a sustainable manner. Water has mythical, symbolic, political, economic and cultural significance and the constant struggle between desire and denial of this basic need in the extremities of Mumbai raises urgent questions of difference, citizenship and social relations.

This documentary film is of the public art project [en]counters: The Fluid City’ held in January 2011 that consisted of site-specific interventions, actions and performances by seven artists from Mumbai. Drawing from the city’s history and geography, these interventions brought into perspective the social, political, ecological and economic value of water. Edited by Kavita Pai, this documentary is produced by the Mohile Parikh Center and ArtOxygen with the support of the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai.

Artists: Tushar Jog, Pradeep Mishra, Prajakta Potnis, Sharmila Samant, Vijay Sekhon, Uday Shanbhag and Parag Tandel

This screening is part of the exhibition examples to follow! expeditions in aesthetics and sustainability that intends to encourage the cultural and aesthetic dimension of sustainability into awareness of the senses and aims at raising awareness for the fact that a constructive sustainability cannot make do without the arts and sciences.

The city, its development and future appears hopeless. Yet what remains fascinating are its people and the “networks of assistance” – as Suketu Mehta puts it – become its driving force, its backbone. Through installations, urban interventions and performances, a group of 10 artists will explore this point of intersection between the vertical development of urban structures and the horizontal expansion of social relations.

Homeland
Artist: Pradeep Mishra | Performance
January 7, 2012 | 8.30 am – 11.00 am
Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai

Mishra will build a symbolic shelter, a vital space within the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Borivali. The installation, which explores how the natural environment and human feelings are intertwined in a pristine relationship, will be made by digging a circle in the ground covered with rose petals. By coupling natural materials, Mishra suggests subtle ways to blend with natural spaces. Every Mumbaikar has a vision of a utopic living space, and Mishra gives shape to his dream home, at the same time shelter and motherly womb. However, the house can never be inhabited, much like the dream itself that never materializes. Along with the installation, a nature trail led by the Bombay Natural History Society and a workshop with students is organized.

How to Milk the Holy Cow
Artist: Uday Shanbag | Performance
January 7, 2012 | 4.30 pm
Kamdhenu Mall, Andheri, Mumbai

Taking inspiration from the recent case of the Kamdhenu commercial centre in Andheri, built on an area initially meant to be used for recreational public use, the artist will actually perform the milking of a holy cow. By juxtaposing a traditional icon to a contemporary construction, the project intends to be an explicit yet ironic critique to the many cases of land misuse regularly appearing on local press and points out the distance existing between shared values and individuals’ interests.

Bulldozer Yatra
Artist: Mansi Bhatt | Yatra and Performance
January 8, 2012 | 12.30 pm to 5.00 pm
Borivali to Azad Maidan, Mumbai

Seated within a bulldozer, Bhatt will disguise herself and begin her journey from Borivali towards South Mumbai. On the way, she will stop at selected locations that have been redeveloped and hand out a certificate of thanks to developers. By using a bulldozer, a sign of virility, and an androgynous costume, Bhatt will comment on stereotypical notions of masculinity and gender. She will conclude her yatra at Azad Maidan. From this symbolic place of protest and freedom, she will dig a patch of earth and place herself in the same spot, inviting passersby to cover her with soil. The action is a satirical remark on the nature of the city and how difficult it is for people to find and claim spaces to live in. Is individual space only possible upon death?

Ghar/Home
Artist: Anupam Singh | Workshops and Installation
January 9, 2012 | 10.00 am to 5.00 pm
Kharghar, Navi Mumbai

Ghar / Home by Anupam Singh aims to explore the dreams/ideas of a home and the aspects of security, permanency, land, shelter, comfort and belonging associated to it that we all carry within us. Where and what is a home? How do we associate with the idea of home through our own experiences of migration? How does this city become our home? In this project, the artist explores the many experiences of migration and the human need to belong and settle. The participants will be invited to a brick kiln in Navi Mumbai to transfer their drawings on the raw bricks which will be baked later, thus having their drawings or writings permanently on it.

In/Out
Artist: Justin Ponmany | Performance
January 12, 2012 | 2.30 pm
Juhu Junction, Mumbai

This project is an interrogation into the emotional ties people attach to their homeland by focusing on the nomad – a character that lives on the margins, without attachments in an in-between state. In an almost comical allusion to the ‘old man’ or the ‘scarecrow’, Ponmany will parade the streets of the city, carrying with him a prototype of this drifter who becomes a character in the artist’s performance. By mimicking the behavior and actions of actual beings that live on the periphery of this city, Ponmany positions his protagonist as a city hero, a liberal recluse with no strings attached living in a wandering condition, on the fringe of society and unaffected by social rules and conventions.

Oasis
Artist: Sharmila Samant | Speculative Model for Gardens
January 13, 2012 | 11.30 am
St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai

A continuation of the developmental work that the artist has been undergoing with the communities of a slum in Annabhau Sathe Nagar (Mankhurd), the artist will speculate on a garden at the site, taking into account the very cloistered environment in this site. Irrigating the garden through four underground wells built during her previous project, the garden space will provide not just fresh produce but will also involve the community on issues related to self-sustainability. The project also aims to provide a model to the dwellers on how urban living spaces can be utilized – not as garbage dumping grounds or sewage deposits – but how they can be transformed into places of beauty as well.

Walking the Jungle
Artist: Prajakta Potnis | Performance
January 13, 2012 | 10.30 – 12.30 pm
Kandivali Station Skywalk, Mumbai

The artist will draw white-sand made lines and posters demarcating and indicating areas in the city where public and private, individual and collective use of space overlaps and clashes. While the work maps out how much of public space is appropriated for private use, it also questions developmental projects by urban planning bodies of the city. The area selected by Potnis overlooks a newly built and vacant skywalk. Clearly, the excessive spending on public infrastructure and outright failure is an illustration that what might work in one city, doesn’t in another. Mumbai’s developers and decision makers need to resolve infrastructural woes internally – by considering the social, cultural, economic fabric of the city itself. In a more playful tone, Potnis will show how people of Mumbai are so used to zigzagging on the streets, where footpaths are converted for commercial use leaving narrow roads for people, cars and animals!

Right to Open Spaces
Artist: Vijay Sekhon | Performance and Street Actions
January 14, 2012 | 3.30 pm
St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai

This is a collaborative performance with theatre activist, Manjul Bharadwaj and students from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. The actions will take the form of street interventions exploring notions of open space and its social, economic, political, historical implications. The performances will comment on how land previously allocated for open spaces have been misappropriated and is an attempt to spark off a public campaign to re-claim lost spaces.

Bombay Dowry (Aaiji chya jivavar Baiji Udar)
Artist: Tushar Joag | Performance
January 14, 2012 | 4:30pm to 5.00pm
Gateway of India to Radio Club, Mumbai

Joag will replicate a matrimonial procession on Mumbai’s streets, an inherent feature of the city’s culture. The procession makes reference to the historical inception of the city – Bombay was gifted by the Portuguese as dowry and subsequently leased to the East India Company. The work is an appropriation that illustrates how today land is still gifted away to builders by charity acts that benefit only the upper classes and further marginalizes the bulk of the city. In the procession, one square foot of soil from different localities of Mumbai with the price tags of the prevailing property rates will be carried as dowry. Joag incorporates popular festivities and rituals into his performance as a way to mask the political potency of his works.

Exhibition Preview and Panel Discussion
April 15, 2011 | 6.30 pm
Studio X, Mumbai

The fluid city originated out of the desire to examine the connections between public art and urban spaces. It is a project that investigates the complexities and contradictions generated by the role water plays in Mumbai.

In [en]counters, through a series of installations, interventions, performances and actions carried out by seven Mumbai-based artists, the project explored the possibilities that emerged from the linkages of art practices with human relations and the uncontrollable chaos of the city’s everyday. By urging artists to examine contemporary issues affecting our daily existence, by shifting the function of art from being purely visual to an active process of provocation, we wanted to illustrate how this terrain is an enriching area for experimentation. To show how art can be a vital tool to stimulate people to think, question, react.

Now, Flow/Cut aims at observing how the remaining objects and the produced documentation re-define the institutional space of the gallery, intended no longer as an abstract container, but as a site integrated within the urban fabric. This exhibition is not meant as a collection of the works which took shape during our public project. It does not just provide a representation of what happened in the outside. Rather, by establishing a dialogue between works scrutinizing the social, ethical, economical binaries of water in the city inside the white cube walls, the fluid city intends to crack frameworks, challenge perceptions and stretch the boundaries of the artistic discourse to open ends.

The discussion Of Denial and Desire: The Paradoxes of Water in the City will be held at the opening of the exhibition. As part of the panel, Tasneem Mehta (Director, Bhau Daji Lad Museum), Jeroo Mulla (Head, Dept. of Social Communications Media, Sophia Polytechnic) and Simpreet Singh (Social Activist, Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan) will intervene along with the artists within the context of this project. The discussants for this program are Claudio Maffioletti (Co-Founder, ArtOxygen), Amrita Gupta Singh (Program Director, Mobile Parikh Center) and Rajeev Thakker (Director, Studio X, Mumba).

Artists: Tushar Joag, Pradeep Mishra, Prajakta Potnis, Sharmila Samant, Vijay Sekhon, Uday Shanbhag and Parag Tandel

Mrigjal – the Mirage by Sharmila Samant is part of an on-going public art project co-produced by the Mohile Parikh Center and ArtOxygen. In association with Amar Joshi, a water diviner and geologist, this intervention by the artist employed a divinatory and scientific technique to locate existing water bodies that still lie under the city, now veiled over by buildings, roads, encroachments. This intervention raises urgent questions about the history of water bodies and its unequal distribution in the city while marking two contested sites: Kala Ghoda, Fort and Annabhau Sathe Nagar, Mankhurd.

As a community art initiative, this project also proposes actual social change with plans to improve existing wells in Annabhau Sathe Nagar (a disadvantaged area) through funds raised at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Mumbai.  The first edition of five art pieces will be sold as part of this fundraiser.  These art pieces are night-lamps which are smaller versions of the actual installations and can be placed in interiors. This project is a non-profit initiative and all the funds raised will be used towards the development of the wells at Mankhurd.