‘Fieldnotes: tomorrow was here yesterday’ featured works by Jitish Kallat that found profound resonance within the space of the Museum. The artist appropriated the Museum’s architecture and intervened within the display cases creating new readings of the collection and the Museum's history. The idyll of the Museum, which represents the aspirations of the city's founding fathers, stood in sharp contrast to the battle for life that is played out on the city's streets and forms the underlying theme of Kallat's works. Forming a significant part of the exhibition is a 120 part sculpture, painstaking created to appear like real bamboo scaffolding, at once revisiting the recent history of revival of the museum and evoking the transitory image of Mumbai as we see it today, caught in a state of perennial (re)development. Inscribed within this form is a script of survival and sustenance, through evocations of the mythic sculptural relief of animals devouring each other that were appropriated from the porch of the Victoria Terminus building where two million people enter and exit every day.
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