Archival Dialogues

The exhibition titled Archival Dialogues seeks to bring together a group of young artists from MSU Baroda, whose practice responds to the manifold ruptures in political, social, ecological and personal spaces, looking through the lens of critical discourses on Archivization and Museumization. To be housed at Ferreira House, Khotachi Wadi, Mumbai, the exhibition seeks to primarily foreground a dialogue between the archival trend in contemporary art theory and praxis, and a largely forgotten fragment of colonial history trapped in this hamlet at the very heart of urban South Mumbai.

The houses with colonial Portuguese architecture hearken back to an era when the race to colonization swept over the seas of this port-city. The East Indian Catholic community have spent over five-generations in the archaic bungalows at Khotachi Wadi, named after Khota, a local Maharashtrian Hindu from whom the plot of land was bought. One such bungalow, now belonging to designer James Ferreira, is the site for our exhibition.

The selection of artists is based on the notion of an archival performative approach adopted by them to different ends to produce art-works for aesthetic consumption. For each of these artists, the relationship between ‘fine-art’ and craftsmanship becomes extremely important in understanding their diverse methods to a quasi-scientific museum display. In a post-modern rhizomatic, the multiplicities of re-interpretation, re-iteration and re-presentation are sought to be explored in a dialectical engagement with the bungalow’s ornate interiors and the private collection of curios, thereby re-addressing the community’s long historical presence in a cosmopolitan locale.