Treasure Hunting

The fun in Jitish Kallat's latest art show is finding the works in the first place.

When Sudarshan Shetty kicked off the revival of Bhau Daji Lad Museum’s ties with the J. J. School of Art last year with his show “This Too Shall Pass”, we noted that the 139-year-old edifice would provide Mumbai with an awkward albeit much-needed contemporary exhibition space. Cluttered as it is with bits and bobs of the city’s history, including dioramas, figurines and maps, the displays, both permanent and temporary, have to contend primarily with the ornate and colourful detailing of the Palladian building itself, which all but envelops and overshadows everything in it. In Shetty’s show, the works were then either placed in rooms on the first floor, segregated from the museum’s own works or shoved into the central hall. As a result, you felt like you were seeing a bunch of random works rather than a single coherent show that was meant to engage with the museum space.

Jitish Kallat, the second artist and J.J. alumnus enlisted to continue the revival, has gone a step or three farther. Other than in the two rooms upstairs, which are clearly marked with the name of his show, “Fieldnotes: tomorrow was here yesterday”, you’re likely to walk right pass the rest of the works. Kallat was given free reign to not only move around display cabinets but also bring out new ones from storage. By successfully following the mandate to enter into a dialogue with the museum collection, he has made it, somewhat perplexingly however, near impossible to find the works themselves. “The intention was to not enter the space with a notion of one own’s art and place in it,” said Kallat, “but see how the collection and one own’s work can be invigorated through a mutual encounter.” For the next five months, Kallat will continue his interventions, inserting more pieces and removing others.

When we visited, the museum had no map or flyer indicating where the works were placed (they should have these by the end of the week); so some of the fun is in trying and ferret out the works for yourself. Think of it as a live action “Where’s Waldo?” but with Waldo as video projections, resin sculptures, bamboo scaffolding and figurines. There are give-aways of course. The bundles of bamboo placed against the column as you enter, and the scaffolding erected around the statue of Prince Albert in the main hall, are on closer inspection resin reproductions, carved with the kind of intricate gargoyles seen on the facade of V. T. station. There are 120 of the bamboo pieces scattered around the hall, culminating in “Annexation”, a giant black lead kerosene stove with hundreds of these gargoyles carved in relief. It’s a messy but bloodless black mix of bats, cows, lions, birds and mythical creatures devouring each other, tearing into flesh and food, which took Kallat almost two years to make. As with his show at Chemould Prescott Road Gallery earlier this month, the works on the ground floor play on themes of sustenance and survival, the wreathing ugly mess of animals that is as suggestive of the cycle of life as it is evocative of the hordes of commuters rushing into V.T. Kallat seems to suggest that they are one and same, all part of the same struggle to eke out each day as it comes.

Before you enter the two rooms upstairs, there is one more intervention that should probably be integrated into the museum’s permanent collection. Called “Anger at the Speed of Fright”, it comprises two vitrines that have been filled with garishly-painted, almost comically-posed toy figures armed with sticks, chains, bottles and stones, engaged in what can only be called a civil riot. Not coincidentally, the cabinets sit next to one from the museum, filled with figures of “foreign communities” that once inhabited Bombay. It’s an apt addendum to the anthropological progress of the city, which is charted from its first fishermen dwellers. The two rooms, meanwhile, have some of Kallat’s older works, including a video featuring X-rays of food hurtling through space, a multi-photo piece made up of detailed shots of men’s shirt pockets and all the detritus they carry in them, another resin installation of flyovers, and a few staged photographs. But it’s these more missable pieces that encompass all too well some of the grimy darkness of Mumbai.

LocationDr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum
Next to Byculla Zoo
91A Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Road
Byculla (East)

Phone6556 0394

Relevant DatesUntil August

HoursThursday to Tuesday, 10am to 5.30pm; Wednesday closed.

Ticketing & Price InfoAdults: Rs10; Children under 15: Rs5. Foreigners: Rs100

Websitewww.bdlmuseum.org