First published on 26th December 2024
What kind of a space is a salon? In novels and plays from the 19th century, it was where women of the upper classes hosted parties and gathered interesting people to exchange ideas and gossip. It was also a venue to discuss concepts and technologies of the modern age, and for creative outputs and debates around painting, poetry, music and the other arts. It was a space both private and public, simultaneously a retreat and an engagement. While it was once removed from the city, it was also removed from the home in which it existed. In World, But No Home, Kaiwan Mehta’s latest curated exhibition at TARQ, Mumbai (October 8-November 16, 2024), we are invited into a salon for our times.
In his curatorial text, Kaiwan sets out a binary between the home as a space for retreat and the city as an anonymous sprawl within which we may be lost. He makes a case for the neighbourhood as a unit in-between, neither definitively ‘here’ nor out ‘there,’ but emerging within a network of bonds tenuously holding us together. These neighbourhoods are havens of familiarity. Here we make alliances with those with whom we share common cause.
The neighbourhood is often imagined as a world cloistered from the outside in many a xenophobic imagination. However, in Kaiwan’s mind, the boundaries of a neighbourhood are not preordained or fixed. We make them in our everyday lives. They are shifting and fluid. We may live in many neighbourhoods at the same time. They might overlap, strengthen each other, or may even be contrary to each other. Yet, somehow, we are able to reconcile with them and through them.
Mehta’s exhibition seems to revel in these makings and un-makings. Within the tight confines of the gallery, he stages a motley gathering of different voices and mediums. One encounters intersections of desiring lines emerging from radically different subjectivities. These lines reach out from within the self towards the city and the world at large, and also simultaneously in the opposite direction, towards quiet contemplation and meditation. Works of art emerge along these lines, mediating desire within the liminal space of the exhibition. The gallery presents these works in a dynamic relationship with one another, inviting viewers to make connections between them.
Some of the first pieces that one encounters in the gallery are costumes worn by drag performers at Kitty Su, a well-known nightclub in Mumbai popular among members of the LGBTQI+ communities. According to Judith Butler, drag is a performance that “plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance.” Drag then is a space that enables a fluidity of identity -- a disturbance of all certainties. In World, But No Home, this uncertainty is seen as a space for possibilities. There are two gorgeously crafted gowns in the exhibition. These are Godx is in the details by the drag performer Glorius Luna, and a gown from the 13 strings collection by the designer Karleo. Both brazenly mine signifiers from Hindu mythology -- the Nataraja in Godx is in the details -- and from American popular culture -- Cher in 13 Strings). Costumes are masks, prosthetics, and can also be shields. They mediate between the self, the body and the gaze -- one’s own, or that of the ‘other.’
Shakuntala Kulkarni’s “Photo Performances” echo this concern, but here through the eyes of a gendered body. The bamboo armour that is worn extends the body’s possibilities in navigating the increasingly hostile environment we inhabit. While in one image, the body stands as a memorial statue in the middle of the city, in the other, it stands at the threshold of a room, about to enter. The space between the city and the self also informs Sameer Kulavoor’s “Development Rates and Celebration Gates,” inspired by pandals built during festival seasons in Mumbai. Here, grey concrete and dazzling colours jostle with each other on a flattened signifier of a gateway.
Signifiers from other places abound in the exhibition. Kaiwan has always been interested in ornamentation as a way of claiming identity. In his book Alice in Bhuleshwar, he took the reader for a walk down the streets of Mumbai’s inner city, looking closely at the ornamentation on the buildings and the stories that they tell. In World, But No Home, we see this interest in Hemangi Kadu’s photo series “Stevens’ Menagerie.” In these images of details from the erstwhile Victoria Terminus (now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus), we see the exuberance of animal and plant forms that were commissioned for the building. Rajesh Vora’s photographs of overhead water tanks in Punjab take on forms that represent the aspirations and identities of the home owners. They include a Statue of Liberty, a football, an airplane and more such icons. These are often playful and ironic.
In many of the works showcased, play mediates the relationship between the real and the represented. Games serve as instruments that help individuals connect to the world around them through role-play. In the “Doll House” by J.M. Mistry, the miniaturization of an “ideal home,” reminds one of the ways in which toys are instrumentalized to indoctrinate normative roles. In the multiplayer video game, Distributed Mind Test, by Sahej Rahal, different players’ identities are meant to collapse into one another in the space of the virtual. Yet, in both, the gap between the player and the identity performed is always present. One is always aware of the artifice, but as in drag, it is deployed in exploring a truth. The ironic position is in itself a liminal one. At once engaged and detached, and able to empathize without completely identifying.
Most of the works described so far are placed in the first space one encounters in the gallery. In between the two other sections, we meet moments in transition, moving between the celebratory and the contemplative. On one wall in between is Chirodeep Chaudhuri’s photo series, “The Commuters (Revisited),” that captures faces of individuals on the Mumbai local trains. Some are in a reverie, some asleep. Others are reading, playing with their telephones, listening to music. This is private time in a public space, in time away from productive time. On the wall, opposite this series of images, are large colour photographs by Dayanita Singh -- the “Dream Villa Triptych One, Two and Three.” Here, the city at night becomes an oneiric world, a place whose contours are blurred, disappearing into blackness. The night becomes rife with possibilities, both ominous and promising.
The second section of the gallery/exhibition seems to be dedicated to an exploration of the domestic -- the world of interiors found, constructed and claimed. Dayanita Singh’s video and photobook on her friend, the hijra Mona Ahmed, tenderly captures a life of refusals and reclaiming by an individual on the fringes of mainstream society. Across this is Vishva Shroff’s “Night Window” series: ruminations on light and time within a room, these images stretch across the length of the gallery. At the far end of this section, one encounters Archana Hande’s “Circle the World in 24,” a video and photo series of a diorama, in which miniaturized objects enter an empty room, assembling a life world. This reminds us of the spaces we make within the city through the things we collect around us.
Each of these interiors marks a complex relationship with the outside. They offer solace and comfort, but also assist in locating the self as an assertion of identity in the anonymous city. One such moment of assertion is documented by Ita Mehrotra’s graphic memoir on the Shaheen Bagh protests in Delhi. Her drawings of the site and conversations with its largely Muslim female participants celebrate a moment of solidarity and communion. Other moments of tender togetherness can be found in Rah Navi’s watercolour, “a bed not big enough,” where a group of women bundle up in the same bed for an afternoon nap. Maybe they are dreaming of a better world.
Perhaps, it is Kaiwan’s training as an architect that influences his role within and curation of this exhibition. In fact, along with the show, there were events organized to explore some of its themes. These included a drag performance by Abhijeet Thakur aka Mysterious Munda, Sure Rajkhowa aka Glorious Luna, and Urmi Jadhav, along with a talk by Ranjit Hoskote on influential non-normative transgressive individuals, and another session on the politics of comedy by Sampurna Chattarji.
To return to the metaphor of the 19th century salon that we started off with, the exhibition, like the salon, is an ephemeral space. It allows us a temporary moment of detachment from the world, allowing us to reflect on our own values and practices. The salon that Mehta creates could unsettle our presumptions, but also makes room for building new alliances. In a world increasingly polarized by the rise of Right-Wing politics, where complex and complicated identities are often violently excised into templates that fit into meta narratives, the protection of these spaces is ever more vital.
Rohan Shivkumar is a Mumbai-based architect, teacher and filmmaker.