Geographies of Consumption: Bombay/Mumbai | Lectures

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, film screenings, public lectures, an annual symposia, and publication. The public art projects will focus on urban consumption through the lens of Land, Water & Food.

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.