Right now, there’s a mandap inside Mumbai’s Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum

A simple stone marker that once showed where the Bombay Fort ended is the jumping-off point for Sameer Kulavoor’s new show, Limits of the Town…, which is now on view at Mumbai’s Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum. The title comes from the stone that delineated the city’s limits after the fort was demolished in the 1860s.

Kulavoor remembers seeing the stone on the grounds of the museum back in 2018, and it stuck with him. That’s not surprising for those familiar with his work, in fact Kulavoor has made his name observing people and the built environment. Through his output, the artist forces viewers to take stock of their surroundings. His zine, for example, is centered on the ubiquitous blue tarp that protects all aspects of the city from the rains, while his canvases feature everything from imagined structures to mundane snippets of daily life —be it the unnamed labourers or variations in building design that catch his eye.

He notes, “[The Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum] invites you to look at their archives and then respond to that.” For Kulavoor, this presented a new way of working and it sparked ideas that he then adapted to his practice.

Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, managing trustee and director of the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, who also curated the show, says, “Inviting artists into the Museum’s archives is an invitation to rethink the intellectual foundations on which this institution once stood. The Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum or the erstwhile Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay, was shaped by the epistemologies of British India, where Indian artists rarely took centre stage and where identities were framed through a colonial gaze. After the museum’s UNESCO award-winning restoration in 2008, the curatorial approach shifted intentionally toward subverting this established canon and opening the collection and the museum’s history to new forms of dialogue.”

Part of Limits of the Town... is ‘State of Celebration’, a site-specific mandap pulled from various strands of thought, including The Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India, a book by Dr John Forbes Watson, which is in the museum archive. Kulavoor notes, “Each book has actual samples and swatches—from Madurai, from Mangalore, from all over India— with his notes, and it’s quite interesting.” Drawing on the city’s position as a former textile capital, Kulavoor’s mandap is made up of custom-printed fabrics that feature everything from geometric patterns to Tetris-inspired embroidery while synthesising Art Deco’s love of asymmetry and Memphis design’s playful nature.

He had presented a series of celebration gates in 2021 (which are viewable in the Paintings Gallery), and this larger work was something he didn’t expect to be able to execute. Kulavoor notes, “Rahul Mehrotra talks about ephemeral urbanism. It’s very interesting to look at [the work] like that. In a sense, it encapsulates the whole transient nature of everything that is urban.”

His works often seem in conversation with the museum’s permanent collection, like when one of the two ‘Metamorphosis’ sculptures sits alongside a scale model of the ‘ideal Indian village’. The former soars upwards—a mass of highways, balconies, air-conditioning units, grills, and rebar that grows out of the utilitarian fishing crates seen in and around the city’s Sassoon Docks (where Kulavoor showcased similar work at St+art’s Mumbai Urban Arts Festival in 2023)—and in the background sits a sprawling tableau with individual red-roofed homes mixed in with essential services like a school and post office. Mehta adds, “Positioning the artworks within the museum spaces is a deliberate strategy. I have conceptualised to allow for a more dynamic exhibition that is presented outside the typical white-cube format.”

The heart of the exhibition is a new work—the sprawling artwork ‘Limits of the Town’—which takes the museum’s collection of maps as its starting point but becomes a unique meditation on the city of Mumbai. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot everything from dreamed-up highways to the stone that gives the exhibition its name and the subtle hand gestures captured. The work, in grey and brown, is one of many in a colour scheme that mimics urban life. Kulavoor notes, “You have concrete, and generally cement dust that falls all around. The browns you can see are the bricks or the older parts of the city.”

It’s a colour scheme that grounds three new series as well. ‘Wall Politic’ and ‘Room for Thought’ both look at the wall and use it to force viewers to think about notions of access, while the latter visualises different boundaries and turns them into metaphors. One work breaks up a wall with a set of stairs to welcome visitors, while others fold into each other to create an impenetrable maze. The last series of works is titled ‘Name Place Animal Thing’ and it features Kulavoor’s interpretation of still life. But instead of fruit, visitors will find everything from Jitesh Kallat’s ‘Aquasaurus’ (which has also been shown at the museum) to a Sintex water tank. It draws from a wide range of references; visitors will find Sandeep Sangaru’s Elephant, an Air India paper cup, Tipu’s Tiger, and more.

Cities keep rebuilding, mostly as a palimpsest, sometimes as ouroboros. Today cement dust and more are the reason for high AQI readings and yet there are always mandaps being built for family celebrations. Kulavoor’s show looks at urbanism and its many layers, sliced by time (dating back to the 1860s and the demolition of the fort), and infrastructure (concrete chhajjas and mandaps are equally fascinating for Kulavoor) while always keeping people at the centre. When walking out, past busts of Prince Albert and sundry other colonisers, it’s the koli fisherwomen and construction workers that catch one’s attention. They’re painted on the back of ‘State of Celebration’ and are a reminder that, in between the layers, cities are built for its residents.

Limits of the Town... will be on view at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, till December 28