Fieldnotes: Tomorrow Was Here Yesterday

‘Fieldnotes: tomorrow was here yesterday’ featured works by Jitish Kallat where 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. 

These miniature models created by the artist were juxtaposed with the showcases displaying the Museum's clay model collection representing the communities of Mumbai.

Lipid Opus and Cry of the Gland, installation view

The photographic installation, 'The Cry of the Gland', continues the examination of the urban detail- the piece was made by randomly approaching passerbys in the street and photographing the pockets of their shirts, often bulging or sagging under the weight of daily necessities like pens, cell phones, keys, wallets that hang like extensions of the body.

In this work the artist Jitish Kallat used a glass marker to draw on the Museum's showcase of colonial army regiments. The drawing resembled shattered glass caused by a gun shot, and referenced the Uprising of 1857 triggered by a military revolt within the British Indian Army.           The work further referenced an episode in the Museum's early history; in 1857 its first collections, displayed in city's Town Barracks at the time, were damaged in the rush to vacate the space, which was required for the military effort.       

The photographic works 'Chlorophyll Park (Mutatis Mutandis)' are further explorations into the ‘urban uncanny’, the asphalt streets appearing to have been overrun by an artificial mutant grass that the artist grew in his studio. These digitally composite photographs evoke a time when urban expansion is halted, and nature exacts its claim on the concrete jungle.