Art Mumbai 2024: Mahalaxmi Racecourse, Mumbai

With a diverse roster of artists across conditioning, intention, practice and cultural attitudes, our presentation seeks to engage with the contemporary cultural imaginations of the Indian Subcontinent and its global diaspora, often through elegant and persuasive re-interpretations of marginal histories and traditional knowledge systems among speculative realities. Our curation explores themes such as the organized chaos of urban development and city life; deconstructions of systemic ideologies and cosmic beliefs into everyday narratives and arrangements; interpretive anthropologies of grassroot communities, activities and aesthetics; the porosity of borders and the politics of movement and touch; the generative potential of mythologies through text and image; and visceral accounts of philosophical and creative anxieties, among others.

 

Our presentation features a spectacular painted shutter work by Atul Dodiya, whose unveiling of the motorized, galvanized roller shutter reveals an oil painting underneath; photographs by the Prix Pictet award-winning Gauri Gill from her ongoing series titled Acts of Appearance, shot in rural Maharashtra; striking canvases from Sudhir Patwardhan exploring the chaotic infrastructure of urban landscapes and the impact on people who navigate them; a selected body of recent work by Rameshwar Broota, exploring absent narratives through his quintessential technique of scraping paint with a blade to create expressive variations in tone; surrealistic drawings by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Balkrishna Doshi, whose visual narratives conflate personal inflections of time experienced as memory, presence and possibility; a large figurative canvas by Zaam Arif surveying the existential crisis of the modern individual; a minimalist assemblage of mirrors constructed through meditations on the self existing in time and tradition by Astha Butail, an artist we have recently added to our roster; and a bronze sculpture featuring two young rural girls by the recently deceased A. Ramachandran – among other noteworthy artworks.