In an exhibition that explores the myth and history of city-building, Sameer Kulavoor maps out the ambition, aspirations, and designs that go into the making of Mumbai
Limits of the Town
An artist sees what others miss. For Sameer Kulavoor, the daily walks down the broken pathways of Borivli, the odd roadblocks, unpaved bricks, and heaps of cement lying around, were all ‘peculiar images’. “I am constantly taking notes, photographing, or recording,” the 42-year-old artist shares. This constant reshaping of the Maximum City’s limits emerges as the theme for the artist’s latest exhibition, Limits of the Town, at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum.
Kulavoor was invited by Museum trustee and curator, Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, to explore the idea starting from the Museum’s archive of the city’s urban plans. “One was aware of the Fort and the history of the Fort. But it was fascinating to see the drawings,” he shares. Among the elements that caught his eye were the plaques about the city limits of early Bombay in the vicinity of the Museum itself. “I remember seeing it in the early ’90s, and I was fascinated by how you could put down a marker to the city. Most older cities have forts and walled cities from the time of their early defence. We [in Mumbai] have completely lost any trace of it except for these records and maps,” he elaborates.
State of Celebration. Pics Courtesy/Sameer Kulavoor; Dr Bhau daji lad Museum
Mehta adds, “As the city museum, we remain deeply engaged with Mumbai’s changing urban landscape, its history of reclamation, migration, and renewal. I first encountered Sameer Kulavoor’s work in 2017 at Sassoon Docks and was immediately drawn to how his practice could bring a contemporary lens to these ideas, transforming familiar architectural forms into a meditation on belonging and resilience.”
The limits explored by the artist were both physical and psychological. Growing up in Borivli, the artist remembers walking through fields, past lazing donkeys on his way to school. “In the last five years, you have had a heightened sense of these vanishing boundaries, with infrastructure projects on steroids. We have experienced so much discomfort in manoeuvring the city, and yet have learned to live with this compromised experience, in the hope of recalibrating our future,” Kulavoor observes, before adding poignantly, “The present never seems to be complete.” The aspirations and ambitions of its residents often leave a mark on the city’s physical boundaries.
Name Place Animal Thing
It is these unfulfilled images of abstract limits that find their way into the series. The eponymous centrepiece is a work that symbolises this hungry growth of the city’s limits. “It starts with the drawing of the Fort [district] at the centre, which I extrapolated upon. I revisited it with elements of abstraction — barriers, roadblocks, chajjas (vernacular eaves), heaps of concrete. The structural and mundane are often metaphors of bigger ideas,” Kulavoor says.
For Mehta, the work is the response of a Mumbaikar to a constantly evolving city. “Over the past year, Kulavoor has interrogated the Museum’s archive of urban plans, objects, and dioramas showing the development of the city and explored the intersection of its form and fabric. His works distil the city’s built environment, stripping away the excess to reveal its underlying character. Through this exhibition, we invite the audience to reflect on what it means to inhabit a city that is constantly redefining itself.”
Sameer Kulavoor and Tasneem Zakaria Mehta
It is this multiplicity of meaning that also defines Mumbai. Even as he expands on how the ordinary chajja has changed and adapted through design, materials, and style, he observes, “The single most important thing about the city is its plurality. We are like Europe, but packed within one country. It brings a different texture to the city, even in architectural language.”
Nothing captures it quite like the work, Name Place Animal Thing. It captures the constant Babel-tower-like rise of the city’s buildings, whilst hiding within itself the many motifs of its past. The role of the Museum in hosting a contemporary art exhibition, alongside its archival treasures, offers a dynamic contrast, the artist admits. Kulavoor concludes by saying, “For these thoughts to percolate into the public mind, they need to be exposed to it visually. To understand and have that discourse, people need to experience it.”
TILL December 28; 10 am to 5.30 pm
AT Dr BDL Museum, Veermata Jijabai Bhosle Udyan and Zoo, Byculla East.
ENTRY Museum tickets apply
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