Preview
The "Nature" of the "City"
Curator's note
Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said recently in an interview with Tehelka that his "vision of a poverty-free India will be an India where a vast majority, something like 85 percent, will eventually live in cities. Not megalopolises but cities. In an urban environment it is easier and more efficient to provide water, electricity, education, roads, entertainment and security rather than in 6,00,000 villages." A visitor to one of India's burgeoning urban areas may raise an eyebrow at the optimism expressed here--some of the country's fastest growing cities do a very poor job indeed of providing the necessities he mentions--but it reflects a long-standing set of assumptions about the potentially liberating and modernising effects of urban living. Debates over the status of the city vis-a-vis the countryside in India have served as a proxy for a much larger set of concerns about the country's modernisation since long before Independence, epitomized by
the disagreement between Nehru and Gandhi over the meaning of "village India." In the process, the complex, dynamic relationship between the country's cities, their urbanising peripheries, and the rural hinterlands that surround and link them, has been reduced to simple dichotomy between "urban" and "rural."
Lost along the way is a conceptual framework for making sense of the interpenetration of these categories that already typifies the experience of "a vast majority" of India's citizens, whether they live in a "major metro" or a dusty market town. Trees grow out of walls in Chandni Chowk. Buffaloes graze in the aangans of Shahpur Jat. Digitally printed banners and quick glass-and-steel construction make anxious urban simulacra of even the smallest towns, and in the peripheral space between them, an entirely hybrid rural-urban form is taking shape: Gurgaon--along with its many would-be rivals--works like a radical experiment in unplanned growth, with daunting megamalls sprouting up next to agricultural shanty villages on the roads leading out to housing developments landscaped with golf courses planted in imported grass. Identifying what is urban here and what is rural, is as difficult as identifying what is "natural" and what is "artificial." Visit
the labor camps and you will find a population that is just as difficult to pin down, one comprising temporary migrants and long-stayers, people who move from rural village to urban periphery to city centre work site and back again, drawing on economic and social networks that invisibly bind these spaces together and strengthening them in the process. There is a story here, but it isn't one about a "city mouse" and a "country mouse."
We are putting together a group show, scheduled for September 18 to 24 at the Visual Arts Gallery in the India Habitat Centre, that will tell a different kind of story, one that situates itself at the environmental, human and architectural intersections in India's urbanising ecology, at the busy borderlands between what is built and what grows. The show will combine visual art with conceptual pieces, and will bring together artists working with drawings, paintings, photography, sculpture, design and new media, along with social researchers and documentarians who have opened fascinating angles of inquiry into related phenomena. We hope to assemble a group of no more than ten participants and solicit from them a body of new works devoted to exploring this basic question: what is the "nature" of the "city"?
About the curators:
"Alexander Keefe is an independent Delhi-based critic and writer. He has written for ART India, Matters of Art, Camerawork Delhi, and Nature Morte Gallery, the Guild Gallery, and blogs at jugaadoo.blogspot.com. He did graduate work in Sanskrit and Persian at Harvard University, worked in the Indian Art department at the Sackler Gallery there, carried out research in India as a Fulbright fellow, has taught critical theory and Asian religions at Ohio University, and has divided his time between the United States and India since the early 90s."
Nitin Mukul is a Delhi-based artist. He was included in the exhibition Fatal Love at the Queens Museum of Art in NYC in 2005. He had a fellowship at the Kanoria Centre for the Arts, Ahmedabad in 2003. He has worked as an assistant for the late American minimalist artist Sol Lewitt and was a former Creative Director at the Indocenter of Art & Culture in NYC. He has had recent shows with Nature Morte and The Guild, NY. He previously curated an exhibition titled 'Blow the Conch' at P.S.122 in NYC in 2004.
http://www.nitinmukul.com