Visual and textual artists show how Mumbai's urbanism is shifting

What images best represent Mumbai? The architectural marvels in the sea-kissed southern reaches of the city that the hop-on-hop-off tour buses like to show off? “If you’ve newly arrived here, the ‘South Bombay’ romance lasts for a week or so,” says photographer Ritesh Uttamchandani. “Then you start living in Kandivali or work somewhere like Kurla. A lot of people don’t even see the sea for six months or a year.” His recent depictions of Mumbai focus on more granular local phenomena, unfolding in the corners and in-between spaces of suburbia. Indeed, migrations are increasingly being recorded not into the southern or central districts but northwards, into neighbourhoods like Borivali, Malad, or Goregaon where Uttamchandani himself lives. 

His photos, which are also current for having been shot on an iPhone and in square mode, are on display in The Shifting City, an exhibition on how the city morphs to accommodate changing senses of urbanity. Architect and curator Kaiwan Mehta has commissioned and borrowed several works for the Indian chapter of the global exhibition Making Heimat.

Two panels from Sudhir Patwardhan’s ‘Mumbai Proverbs’

Germany, Arrival Country, which began in 2016 as an effort to document Germany’s housing immigrants including from war-affected Syria. Two walls of the spacious Max Mueller Bhavan in Mumbai tell stories of German cities including Offenbach and Stuttgart where people arrived in the thousands and the pockets where they now live and work. 

The two exhibitions on the German cities and on Mumbai are in dialogue with each other, but they are also distinct. “Migration is not always distress migration,” says curator Mehta. According to him, instead of an “arrival city”, Mumbai is the “arrived-in city”, moving into which makes people feel like they have “made it”. “People come to Mumbai to be part of a global experience. So the question was how does it present itself as this ‘arrived-in’ city?” Mehta brought together artists who had been exploring similar themes in their work. 
 

Uttamchandani’s camera seeks out interactions between the mundane and the aspirational, with a strong sense of irony: an “I Love Mumbai” sign where the heart had been bandaged and undergoing repairs, a luxurious bedroom advertised above a bus-stop seat where someone is napping, or a man using a too-high electric socket at a railway station to charge his phone. 

More tropes of urbanity come through in Sameer Kulavoor’s artworks, including smartphones, hairstyles and ennui. He painted crowds, people scattered with nothing else in the background, in a way that makes apparent the nature of urban architecture. In “Public Matters” Kulavoor sketches scenes from cafés and food courts (the new addas, as Mehta calls them) in suburbs, a sign of them urbanising just as fast as they are alienating. Excerpts from writer Rachel Lopez’s essays, where she writes on the shapeshifting definitions of Mumbai, are printed on the walls and also play as audio.

Older works by two other photographers, Pallon Daruwala and Peter Bialobreszki, who have documented Mumbai’s superstructures (skyscrapers and flyovers), are on view too. As is a scaled-down version of Sudhir Patwardhan’s 2014 painting “Mumbai Proverbs”, in which he depicts the textural changes as one moves from South Mumbai into the suburbs, and hints at likenesses between office cubicles and slums, and chawls and malls.

A selection of photos of the suburbs shot with an iPhone

A show that is equal parts creative and academic, The Shifting City reflects without much judgement the refashioning of Mumbai’s spaces and objects and the way people navigate them. In searching for representations of the city beyond the dabbawallahs, local trains, slums, or hawkers, it uncovers underexamined lived experiences.

Pallon Daruwala’s photos show how high-rises turn the city into an ‘object’ to be ‘viewed’ from a distance

'The Shifting City' will show until May 26 at Max Mueller Bhavan, Kala Ghoda, Monday to Saturday from 11 am to 7 pm