Campaigners during the Quit India Movement, Gowalia Tank – 1942

7000 Museums: A Project For The Republic Of India is comprised of a comprehensive body of artworks, with oil paintings, water colours and sculptural assemblages. The works evoke a layered dialogue with varied conceptual frameworks from the Museum’s collection, as they reference defining moments of history, art history as well as the semantics of museums and museum displays.The paintings in oil recreate historical photographs of events from the freedom struggle which recall the magnificent aspirations of the nation’s founding fathers. These are ruptured by a strong painterly gesture in colour against the black and white, taken from abstractions from the works of artists of the time, such as Rabindranath Tagore, as well as the Museum’s archive of pre restoration damaged paintings . The gesture sometimes acquires a flourish that recalls the decorative lines of the building as the artist fuses fact and fantasy into a striking allegory of our times.