Mapping Our Times

In a new exhibition, three artists reimagine what the maps of their cities would look like today.

Neeraj Patel rummaged through waste from a pharmaceutical company near his house in Baroda to create his artwork.

The Greeks and Romans were the earliest known map-makers in history. On their long travels around the world, they would record the position of the mountains, rivers and places of habitation preparing rough sketches based on observation and intuition. Borrowing a leaf from their book, three artists have attempted to capture the constantly changing urban landscape through an exhibition in the city. Titled “Urban Cartographers”, the show opened at the Gallery Beyond on Monday.

Over a period of one year, artists Mitali Shah, Neeraj Patel and Shrikant Kadam re-imagine the concept of a map through paintings, mixed media and installations. Vibhuraj Kapoor, curator of Gallery Beyond, had been following their work for a while. He says, “I realised they were, in their own styles, drawing maps of the cities they lived in. The maps in the exhibition go beyond being two-dimensional guides. They represent the sociological elements of a city.”

Baroda-based Shah, captures the city in transition: through either its growth or decay. “For instance, in the monsoon I would watch the streets for months, keeping a daily journal of paintings,” says the 27-year-old artist. “When completed, you could see the degradation rate of the roads as clear as day: how the small pothole in the first painting turns into a big road block at the end of the series,” she says. Her work is characterised with the use of organic materials such as jute, hand-made paper and threads for a “city which is an organism, constantly shape-shifting and utterly unpredictable”. In the show, as her 11-part series, wounds progress, we see a crumpled paper which she uses as a metaphor for the city’s skin under torment — burnt and torn in stages.

Like Shah, another 27-year-old from Baroda, looked closer home for inspiration. “Next to my house, there is a large pharmaceutical factory. I wandered around the area for days, rummaging through the waste thrown out of the factory,” says Patel. He then documented the discarded items through photos and drawings turning them into mix-media works. An untitled exhibit shows a sheet of brass eroded severely by chemicals, while another shows heaps of waste being piled to look like towering buildings before a pink sky.

While the two artists look at urban scenes, Kadam turns his attention away from the city. “I map the city by looking at what it has done to the nature around it,” he says. The 40-year-old Pune-based artist earlier painted realistic landscapes with the silhouettes of the mountains and the rivers visible through the works. Dealing in abstraction now, the figures in his works are a blur of soft greens and yellows. Researching on patterns in nature for the last 15 years, Kadam says all his maps deal with nature. “The city, unfortunately, is a big part of it now,” he says.

amruta.lakhe@expressindia.com

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