Time Traveller

On entering the museum premises,a scene of tragic horror—a crashed wooden car perched on a revolving base—greets the viewers. The reminiscences of a fateful journey set the premise of the impending museum tour—an experience which one later discovers summed-up on neon a sign that reads,‘Sometimes when we travel,we forget who we are.’ The exhibition is the artist’s attempt to bridge the life outside and inside the museum. As he juxtaposes his art intermittently along the statues of forlorn men and the chronology of the museum,his aim eventually turns vivid.” In India,the concept of the museum corresponds with something distant and banal. I have tried to induce dynamism in the space by the movement in my works. The moment something is placed in a museum it becomes static and preserved. Similar effect happens to the emotions that my works produce,” says Shetty.

One such exhibit is his own statue — a bronze colossus toppled off it’s pedestal. It merges his lifespan into history,while he connives at the museum’s prime purpose of building and preserving icons. Since the statue resurrects only by throwing coins in the adjacent box,it’s rise and fall lies with the whims of the viewers,and thereby stirs up a satire on the double-edged nature of any franchise accorded to people.

Shetty has exhibited in museums abroad,but his relationship with the BDL museum dates back to his childhood. “My father would often bring me to the museum and I would be enticed by it everytime. So when the museum approached me to exhibit here as part of their restoration and re-modelling project,I was more than eager. Besides,Indian museums,unlike the ones in the West,are not just for the elite or educated. Everyone comes to visit them,” says the 49-year-old.

The fervour of Mumbai is central to Shetty’s work,even though he has not done a solo show in the city for nearly five years due to his projects abroad. For this exhibition,he composes art with pieces found in Chor Bazaar and the city’s dump yard. He employs materials like wood,metal and plastic,which not only evoke the streets around the museum — an area where city’s earliest chawls were built to house the mill workers — but also materials that reduce the horror of his mortifying themes. “The difference between the West and the Indian sub-continent is that here,entertainment is very important. Most of the traditional art forms transform something tragic into an entertaining repertoire for the masses. My work does the same,” he says. Shetty’s this claim stands true as one discovers the other exhibits—an over-sized cage with a menacing sword swinging like a time slicing pendulum,which nevertheless invites a passage; a bleeding chair with a neon sign on the seat that advertises ‘scar’; a fallen tower,housed by cob-webs,that bleeds itself into shiny red pixelates and a skeleton of a rocking horse that forbids one to ride.

“I am waiting to see the reaction to the exhibition. When people from different walks of life come to see my work,like children with school tours,I will be able to assess my work better,” he says. Within hours of the opening,signs of a success emerged. The awe-struck viewers shed their initial apprehension to the swinging sword and passed through the cage and the coins thrown in the money box ching-a-linged to a sum of Rs 6,000 that rose Shetty’s icon by a few inches. At a party held by Galleryske on Saturday,a momograph,The More I Die The Lighter I Get,tracing Shetty’s rise to international acclaim was also launched.