Mumbai Urban Arts Festival: Sassoon Docks, Mumbai

After its first appearance in 2017, the Mumbai Urban Arts Festival (MUAF), curated by the team of St+art has come back to the city. The long gap was partly necessitated by the COVID lockdown. This year sees the slow opening up of cultural spaces and events. While several art spaces and museums in the city remain closed for scheduled renovations, shiftings and upgradations (the Bhau Daji Lad under repairs, the Goethe Institute temporarily relocating, the Chhatrapati Shivaji MVS accommodating other functions, the precincts dug up for Mumbai renovations), the art district seems to be atimely disrupted for the tourists and local population flocking to these venues. The trail to MUAF seems almost natural in such a scenario - and it is a welcome one on several fronts.

First, the MUAF takes further the idea of street art - a form that inevitably and openly operates in the public realm. Thus it works through the roughness of the street and productively intersects it with the notion of the white-cube gallery. Secondly, it opens up the Sassoon Dock - one of the oldest docks for fishing, to the public, which while public, would not be visited by people. As the utility of much of these docks fade away after the shifting of port activities to JNPT, large amount of warehouses in the city along the ports lie vacant and underutilized. In many instances, these spaces quickly become privy to private development or real estate and become obnoxious consumer hubs for the middle and upper class gentry. The taking over of such space by art maintains its publicness, at least provisionally. Lastly, and in continuation with the above, the festival's dialogue with the urban character of Mumbai is refreshing - for it does not sanitize its environment, rather folds in the smells, sights, sounds, scale and street culture into its curation. 

When my colleague asked me "So what makes it 'urban'?" - I had to make no effort. My response was prompt: The grittiness of this exhibition, its bold embracing with the dense fishy smell, the heavy air gleefully nauseating the warehouse, the rawness of encounter with the warehouses of the dockyard, the activated life of the peripheral spaces, the takeover of the inside and outside, and the unpretentious mounting of the overall festival was something one could certainly not expect from the galleries - those that are reasonably insular, airconditioned, white boxed, doored, domesticated and fairly sanitized (inevitably creating latent spectral hierarchies). The MUAF turns the terms of art engagement upside down. The viewer is not only thrown in the space of the street (conceptually) but also kept unsettled by the immediate environment as they encounter art displayed within the raw warehouses of the Sassoon Docks. Rather, you are forced to consume art in the full energy of the city. It is such an intensity that makes the festival urban. 

'Mumbai' in the MUAF gets defined curatorially as the sea-child, situated besides a busy dock and immersed in the songs, stories and turbulences of the sea. The different layers of the exhibition shed then are the depths in which we encounter the artworks. Much like a large vessel, the lowermost floor of the space drones, gurgles, bubbles and dabbles into the deep water experiences. In this zone we find artworks that expose us to the geography of deep sea. 

An astronomical handwoven net made out of discarded plastic oil containers engulfs the public as we enter the exhibition. In his installation 'Sea never dries', the Ghana based artist Serge Attukwei Clottey interweaves the material and memory of the yellow plastic containers used for the import of cooking oil from the West, which would not only find a variety of afterlives in their households, but also became a difficult object to decompose. Together with the community, Clottey weaves a vast net of plastic swerving the biography of these containers, preventing them from being disposed into the trenches of the sea. 

We move further in a space of typographic hall where walls call for a phenomenal experience of text and language by French artist Rero. Executed in the space by Arif Alam Khan, the strike-through black and white letters come to life in the beautifully daylit volume of the warehouse. The flipped letters begin to appear straight in their reflections within the mirror fragments on the floor. The subsequent spaces within this level have video works that speak of abuse, consumption, commodification of the sea. Meera Devidayal's three channel video work 'Water has memory' brings us to reflect in the space of water; Khyati Trehan's digital screens speak of migration, movement and material across the sea; Parag Tandel's sculptures illuminate the translucent bodies of deep sea creatures. Sajid Wajid Shaikh and Ronak Soni speak of leakages and liquid transports through an enmeshed installation of PVC pipes. Sohrab Hura's immersive video work of the coast/shore is cleverly placed between leakages and sea - or the dry and the wet. Naman Saraiya and Nikita Rana's photodump within the toilet spaces remind us of the palimpsest of messages left on the walls of public toilets that drain bodily wastes into the sea. Incidentally, within the exhibition the toilet spaces were also the only neutral smelling spaces saved away from the fishy fragrance pervasive in the remaining space. They were spaces of refuge, relief and release at the same time. 

We rise above into an airy volume of textual work sandwiched generously between a large scale wall mural and Sameer Kulavoor and Sandeep Meher's scaled models of the metamorphosing city. A close look at the models reveals the intricate material and political intertwinements within the built environment and history of Mumbai. Mounted and morphed within the plastic containers used to carry fish, the installation indexes social, economic and political histories that lay the ground for its sprawling development. The enterprise and grimness of the city is captured in the coloured trays and concrete greys clinging onto each other like the solidified debris within the sea.  

As one takes a position to look at this configured geography of the above installation, the city framed through the window of the warehouse begins to dialogue with the exhibits within the room itself. As we turn, the eyes of the large mural by Australian artist Guido Van Helten preserved from the last season of MUAF, on the opposite wall begin to gaze at the viewer standing in the metamorphosing city blocks through the larger than life text on the adjacent wall, reading "How many generations does it take for a dream to come true?" In look at these three artworks together, memories of the city, stories of rehabilitation, longings of redevelopment, the horizons of hopes and aspirations with which people migrate to the city coalesce together. 

The subsequent halls boast fantastic stories of the fisherfolk, their everyday at the work, of rituals and myths, colour and celebration, by the Kerala based artist collective Trespassers. The women's toilet is intervened by another typographic work by Koshy Brahmatmaj, followed by a gender neutral toilet right above set up by the Gaysi family, which is as embracing as the art within it. Along the staircase is another interactive, gentle yet provocative typographic installation by Mumbai based Aqui Thami in the form of bills, asking viewers to fill up their names and how they make (/are making) the city. Rithika Pandey in her hall-work 'Shrine for my oceanic mother' creates a trippy zone where viewers transpose themselves into a mythical space of imaginary oceanic creatures and godesses. The lightness of the work, its evaporative and ephemeric quality is well interposed with the outside which is screened through an aqua filter. 

If this was not all, we are opened into the terrace where the large Sintex water tank is turned into a sound box by Delhi based Pranav Gohil. Here, visitors dive sonically to sum up the storm of the sea in their ears. The terrace gives a panoramic view of the overall city, the sheds, docks, coastline, boats, and the sea, a perfect climax to reorient oneself to the city of Mumbai.

As we returned downstairs, we entered the courtyard where a scaffold pavilion sheltered benches for hangout of both, humans and animals. Faizan Khatri's animal pods abutted with planters created pockets for cats, dogs and unsheltered beings. The walls of the warehouse were underway to get ready by artworks for the phase two of the exhibition, that we are told, will open in the coming month. The other murals by Vayeda Brothers in collaboration with Malaysia based Andha Ras on these walls speak of the delicate underwater life - of creatures, sea weeds, corals, fish, flora and myriad creatures. The ghosts of sea vessels appear and disappear within these large-scale paintings, bringing us to confront the magnanimity of the city and sea together.