Art maximum

“The whole idea is to create a culture around art,” says Krishnamachari. “When I was a student,I didn’t have access to many books that I would have loved to read. This is my way of making accessible to people what wasn’t available to me.”

Gallery BMB leads the pack of young,swish galleries which refuse to streamline art into the narrow category of paintings and sculptures. Anupa Mehta’s The Loft,Lower Parel periodically holds art awareness sessions,encounters with artists and workshops. Osmosis holds regular film screenings and book readings. On January 22,the gallery is holding a children’s theatre workshop affiliated to the ongoing exhibition by artists Muktinath Mondal and Krupa Makhija titled ‘I-SO-LATE-d’ where the kids will have interactive sessions with Mondal and be taught dramatic techniques to appreciate art by viewing the works on display. Volte in Colaba too features a café which will open shortly and a book shop with such assorted collections as photography books like Yann Arthus Bertrand’s Earth From Above to fun reads like The Complete Sourcebook of Shoes by John Peacock.

“You’ll rarely see finished pieces of work at Volte,” says the marketing consultant of the gallery,Katie Ball,“Most of the art displayed here are experimental and revolutionary.” Volte opened in September 2009,with Mukul Deora’s exhibition where viewers were asked to beat a Contessa car to pulp with sledgehammers. Their current exhibition,Qusai Kathawala’s ‘Our Breath Concrete’ consists of a series of participatory installations powered by breathing. The purpose is to make you aware of your own otherwise invisible breath.

From January 29,Gallery BMB will hold an exhibition of women artists from different streams. Architect Nisha Ghosh will utilise objects like wire meshes and wood carvings to make table mats and candle stands. Fashion Designer Shilpa Chavan will showcase bizarre headgears and accessories while product design guru Divya Thakur will exhibit a series of creative graphic posters.

What these galleries are attempting is to expand the scope of art from just being decorative objects to be hung on a wall to something that’s technologically advanced,interactive and participatory. “We try to exhibit work that is challenging,provocative and slightly tongue-in-cheek,” says Mortimer Chatterjee,co-owner of Chatterjee & Lal,known for the unorthodox art that they showcase. From January 15-17,they will sponsor a performance piece by artist Nikhil Chopra who,in the guise of the Victorian draughtsman,Yog Raj Chitrakar,will walk from Bandra to Colaba and back and make charcoal drawings on canvas from what he observes.

Similarly,Gallery BMB attempts to be the antidote to the traditional,stuffy gallery with crumbling walls hung with oil paintings. Its interiors are imbued with a sense of slick modernity with the walls lined with state-of-the-art LCD players and a stack of DVDs with works of masters like Quentin Tarantino,Federico Fellini and Roman Polanski. Then there is The Loft,which is the first to bring international residencies to Mumbai with exhibitions like ‘Mumbai Tropism’ by Bangladeshi artist Mahbubur Rahman and a curatorial project titled ‘Cultural Difference’ by Kazakhstani Valeria Ibraeva where she takes strident potshots at the political views unleashed by Borat. It is currently displaying the works of Austrian artist Zenita

Komad titled ‘Eternally I Am Your Yes.’

Their numbers might be few and their fans might be a niche group but these galleries prove that art is breaking boundaries and definitions in the city.