Architectural Digest: Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai: This unique show promotes and supports art from the Global South

The show will shine the spotlight on works by Desmond Lazaro, Jitish Kallat, Reena Kallat, Mithu Sen and more

By Uma Nair

(Left) Jitish Kallat, The Infinite Episode, 2015, Dental plaster. (Right) Reena Kallat, Anatomy of Distance, 2019-2020

SOUTH SOUTH is a gallery-led online community, anthology, live resource and aggregator dedicated to art from the Global South and its diaspora. This year-round platform hosts an archive of seminal exhibitions and key curatorial texts alongside a featured section highlighting events, talks and performances from the Global South as well as original interview-based editorial.

The first activation is SOUTH SOUTH VEZA, an online event co-conceived by galleries to promote and support art from the Global South. At Chemould Prescott Road, the show titled 'Holding Space (for the global south)' is a curated exhibition of 6 artists—Shilpa Gupta, Reena Kallat, Jitish Kallat, Desmond Lazaro, Lavanya Mani and Mithu Sen. The works comprise drawings, sculpture, textile and mixed media installations that seek to balance the very delicate tension of multiple vantage points of identity, memory and territory whilst steadfastly holding crucial space for the South in a global narrative building. 

Thought Provoking

Desmond Lazaro’s gold and pigment ‘Dymaxion Map III’ creates a non-hierarchical comprehension of the world, absent of embedded cultural identifiers of North-South. This cartographic revisitation is complemented through Shilpa Gupta’s ‘100 Hand Drawn Maps of my Country’ documenting the differences in people’s ideas of territorial belonging. The carbon on paper find their static copper sculptural companion in Gupta’s ‘MapTracing#1-IN’. This is nuanced further by Reena Kallat’s ‘River Drawings’ displaying the aching futility of physical barbed-wire boundaries, attempting to show ownership of natural entities like water. Reena's approach is both poetic and abstract, using the irregular and possibly illogical lines of a river that passes across states, their geographies and people.

Desmond Lazaro, Dymaxion Map III, Vasco de Gama, Christopher Colombus, Fernao de Magalhaes and James Cook, 2018,  Pigment paint on handmade Sanganeer paper, with raised gold gild .

Shilpa Gupta,  MapTracing#1-IN, 2012 - ongoing,  Copper pipe, wood 24 x 16 x 70 in | 97 x 40.5 x 178 cm, Variation of 6.

Reena Kallat, Anatomy of Distance, 2019-2020, gouache, archival inks and electric wire on Fabriano paper, 37.5 x 56 in | 95 x 142 cm

Paradox of Realities  

Mithu Sen’s ‘Nothing Lost In Translation’ insists on widening the storytelling of public consciousness by creating ambiguous forms on Japanese kozo paper, not restricted by immediate locality, or gender, race, caste, class. This continuing paradox of certain realities being cultural equalisers, such as endless, yet finite, consciousness experienced while sleeping, is captured through Jitish Kallat’s ‘The Infinite Episode’.

The work portrays a natural utopia: the creatures, despite real-life divergences, are here represented approximately equal in size. They share not simply a physical space, but a state of being–sleep–wherein physical scale has been made irrelevant.

Darwinian Dialogues  

Lavanya Mani's pigment-dyed animals and birds in Noah’s Ark clamour at the bottom of this descending scroll-tent in her ‘The Ark Animals of the World Complain to the Raven (after Mishkin)'. They are sparing no one the urgency of this approaching ecological distress and draw  attention towards Darwinian dialogues and harmony in the ecological circle.

Lavanya Mani, The Ark Animals of the world complain to the Raven (after Mishkin), 2018- 2019, Natural Dyes on Cotton Fabric,  Indigo Hand-crafted Quilt, 116 x 78 in each (2 panels) & quilt  295 x 198 cm each (2 panels) & quilt.

In an increasingly divisive world, these ideas of identity, memory and territory presented by these artworks create a much-required space for contemplation, collaboration, and conversation. Above that the confluence of these artists creates a candid corollary in the practices of contemporary art in India.

The Online Viewing Room titled ‘Holding Space (for the global south)’ can be accessed on Chemould Prescott Road's website, until March 7, 2021.

Published on www.architecturaldigest.in.