Art review: ‘CAMP, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf'

The central hall of the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City museum, filled with vitrines of 18th and 19th century collections of ceramics, lacquer and silver badri work, among a host of other things, has seen many transformations in the past year.

A pair of massive doors—16.6ft-tall—had adorned the threshold during The Florentine Renaissance: The City As The Crucible Of Culture, in April. Last month, Atul Dodiya’s exhibition, which placed white vitrines with found objects, sculptures and paintings, brought centre stage a conversation about art: What makes for a collection in a museum? Who decides, and how? And most significantly, do democratic spaces like the city museum, which only charges a nominal entry fee and often sees a decidedly non-gallery-going public, affect the way art is consumed?

This time around, a large screen partitions the hall, and makeshift, three-step cushioned seating has been placed before it. Four times during the day, a film by Mumbai-based studio CAMP, From Gulf To Gulf To Gulf, plays for the public that is free to come and go as it pleases. The freedom accorded to the viewer is telling even as the more intimate gallery upstairs has been converted into a viewing room, with a 60-minute video, titled The Country Of The Blind, And Other Stories, playing on loop. Other components of this show include a photo exhibition, a four-channel, 20-minute video that examines the visible and invisible network of commerce at ports, and an installation of photo cards with text, arranged in the shape of the constellation of Pleiades.

The exhibition, As If–III Country Of The Sea, is part of a pan-India, four-part series that looks at works by the collaboration initiated by film-makers and video artists Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran. It’s the third instalment of the exhibition series, which started at the Experimenter in Kolkata in January; the fourth is on simultaneously at the Chemould Prescott Road gallery in Mumbai. The second instalment was held in New Delhi in January.

In 2009, CAMP won the grand jury award at the Sharjah Biennial for a project titled Wharfage, which followed sailors in dhows between the ports of Gujarat, Somalia and Sharjah, recording their lives on the MSVs (mechanized sailor vehicles) and tracking their radio conversations. Several strands emerged from the project. A map—which gives the current exhibition its title—made of solar exposed cyanotype print on fabric, and created in collaboration with the Shunya collective and Clark House initiative, Mumbai, offers a new way of looking at the world of these sailors.

The map created in 2014 shows the world of seafarers, who are reconfigured as residents not of land, but of the sea between the shores of east Africa, West Asia and western India. This map is also on display, near the photo card installation.

The central theme of the exhibition is an acknowledgement of an unseen and relatively unknown world of seafarers, who negotiate trade that runs “perpendicular to piracy”. A description offered at the exhibition states: “The ports in Somalia are frequented by hundreds of vessels from different parts of Gujarat: Porbandar, Verawal, Jam Salaya and Mandvi. Before heading into Berbera, Kismayo, Mogadishu, or Bosasso, these ships often make a stop at the island of Socotra. The boats usually return to the UAE, or carry goats back to ports in Oman, Yemen or Muscat. Sometimes they carry gum Arabic or shark fins but more often they return carrying hundreds of bags of charcoal. ... Of the dangers and many privations the seafarers face, they do not think much about it. They do not require passports, just crew cards, to travel so far.”

This show attempts to introduce into the sea of museum-goers, another section of cultural meaning-makers who aren’t part of conventional art centres: sailors, who through their journeys, see other dhows burn before them and rejoice when they catch large fish, share information and music through radio networks and over Bluetooth-enabled cellphones; who carry cargo from port to port, and move seamlessly through the Kutchi, Farsi, Balochi and Saraiki languages in the music they hear. The museum-goer might as well be viewing this osmosis of cultures as if through a looking glass.

As If–III Country Of The Sea is on till 7 April, 10am-6pm (Wednesdays closed), at Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, Byculla (East); and As If-IV Night For Day is on till 30 April, 11am-7pm (Sundays closed), at Chemould Prescott Road, Queens Mansion, Third floor, G. Talwatkar Marg, Mumbai.