Internalising A City

Internalising a City (Pune/Poona/Home)

In navigating spaces, we surrender to belonging. This belonging manifests in the form of home, identity, comfort and perhaps, familiarity that in turn gives room to expand into other associations. In the instance of Internalising a City, the expansion ,and reversely contraction, are looked at by these eight artists in relation to Pune. All participating artists hold a link to the city that has adopted them, and grown into what they call home. These associations range from personal childhood memories of growing up in Poona, to more informed ones from adulthood for those who arrived in Pune later.

‘Internalising a City’ in its exhibition format brings forth the question sof what a city means to someone and how home and identity are established within a city? At a time when home as a concept has become fairly mobile, we struggle to establish an anchor to one place. We have desires to move and settle constantly. At the same time, when one leaves a feeling of familiarity, it is then that there is growth. However, how does one grapple with a reaction of returning from the unfamiliar to another unfamiliar, when urbanisation and development have taken over landscapes that once offered comfort for memory and now belong to nostalgia?

Prabhakar Pachpute’s series of intimate sculptures and paintings weigh in the temporality of shifting homes. The human, animal and architectural forms merge as they carry the burdens of trauma related to the artist’s history of being and belonging in different lands and cities. The fragility of the sculptural elements translates the uncertainty in which nostalgia manifests itself. The animals become metaphors for the people and communities that the artist encountered while growing up. He refers to this form as bahairupya, one that is constantly changing. It is also how we change as we navigate people and places in the city. The sense of belonging and losing remains constant in time as we labour through various roles in life that range from family to survival, and caring to be cared for.

Moving deeper into the city’s influence on care is the way we preserve ephemera and memories in our personal archives and stories. We document and collect time in the form of photographs, drawings, texts and sounds to remember something that we may lose.

In Ashutosh Potdar’s compilation of text and images, a vitrine showcases old letters, photographs and theatre archives. His association with the strong theatre community in Pune is linked to his writings that sit atop a vitrine in the form of a zine. His work is a central pause in the exhibition to offer viewers a space to read and lose themselves in the artist writer’s musings about the city and its people. Poetry, notes and reflections appear bilingually to celebrate the nuances of language learnt with time in Pune and the way a viewer may interpret associated and derived meanings from the corresponding images.

Extending literature to food, Rajyashri Goody’s fourteen recipe books delve deeper into Dalit literature through personal stories and narratives that revolve around recipe instructions and food. A set of ceramic bhakris with the recipe books at first glance appears an innocuous depiction of a childhood memory. These were the first objects that the artist started her ceramic journey with and they were also a link to her interest in food politics. Having grown up eating these at home in ‘Poona’, she never felt the need to explain to anyone what a bhakri is. This was until she started moving out and realised the identity and intimacy that food developed with home belonging and caste in such an individualistic manner.

It is these varied layers of memory that keep us from letting go of a city as an external form. Places and cities across the world absorb our personal residues when we move through them. Similarly, as people, we internalise the city through our understanding of it both in outside and inside built spaces, landscapes and our bodies.

Payal Arya and Aditi Kulkarni’s collaborative installation draws out the nuances of what a city’s residue may mean. Their works stem from personal derivations of what Pune means to each of them. The macro details of these works seep into the nuances of personal history that are layered with a larger public history. Semiotics, the study of signs, comes in as a significant player here in narrating how we translate the meaning of objects and spaces. Similar to a conversation between two friends the work speaks as a whole but also moves into individual character details that explore time, privacy, architecture and the body. From a puddle that reflects a street lamp’s yellow glow in the monsoon to the abrasion of skin in lenticular prints, their works extend into structures of time shedding, architecture, Terrazzo tiles and kinetic sculptures. A partial glimpse through glazed windows leads to the curiosity with which we feel the need to peer into other people’s lives and homes.

The act of peering and looking into shafts of details is carried forward in Snehal Goyal’s drawings. The spaces we dream up in the nooks of our home are detailed in her six hand-drawn books. Each page in these accordions seeps in a time frame of pause, reflection and light. She highlights mundane objects and corners of her home by layering them with gold leaf and isolating their presence as trivial important elements of her everyday life. Time and light are evident in these works through the angle of the shadows that keep transforming in the spaces they occupy. These books that were created during the pandemic move from the inside to the outside in Goyal’s layered drawings where the act of looking through windows and doorways becomes an active part of viewing the work for curious passers-by.

In moving through the city, we often skim over details that may seem insignificant but internally we itch to correct them. With this impulse, Vaibhav Raj Shah under the garb of the Beauty Inspector surveyed and scored the city of Pune. He based his interpretations on a realistic assessment of public spaces such as footpaths, walls and benches. The works that involved graffiti and photographs became the artist’s understanding and interpretation of landscape paintings. The photographs move away from the superficiality of constant performance and perfection, and toward an adopted idealism that is less to do with the politics of the city and more towards nature’s existence within built environments.

These roles of loss and longing that play out also seep into Rupali Patil’s landscapes which are construction of thought forms. For her, the idea of home itself becomes a landscape. Elements from around her house and the city weave their way through school benches, planters, staircases and sugarcane fields. Her works that may seem distant from architecture are in fact a contradiction to how we as humans have isolated ourselves from nature. She highlights the appreciation we have for landscapes without people. This in turn reflects the city that in its emptiness would only seem abandoned. Juxtaposing the fear of isolation, the artist converges her surroundings with thought forms to create compositions that offer solace and belonging in landscapes of the unknown.

Through these personal chapters of time that expand from the city into landscapes and memory architectures of the mind the artists in this exhibition work closely with the time that has layered and internalised a city, Pune, which they call home. These time frames are created and hidden with emotions. They are laden with strained roots of past associations that inform their current situations and places. The works that oscillate between details of the skin to worn walls of the city, recipe books to collected letters and photographs, and light from windows to imagined and forgotten lands, link back to the various paces and ways in which the city has been experienced. Trying to understand Pune or Poona as a city in this exhibition, leads to a realisation that the city exists in every conversation yet disappears as a form the moment it begins to internalise a personal dialogue. We are all Internalising the City.