Necropolis of Remains

Inspired by Saumya Roy's Mountain Tales, this exhibition journeys into the stark yet deeply human world of Mumbai's garbage mountains. Responding to the chronicles from the book, the exhibiting artists respond to the book and urban ontology - consumption habits of the city people. Roy's book chronicles the lives of waste pickers who live and work in the shadows of one of India's largest landfills transforming society's discards into sources of survival, connection, and meaning.

The participating artists have been specially selected by Priyasri Patodia, they are students and recent pass-outs of M.S. University, Baroda. With Mountain Tales as a prompt, the artists have used materials that reiterate our relationship with consumption, layered realities and respond through their own inner archaeologies of memory, material, and metaphor.

Through painting, installation, and multimedia, the participating artists - Arun B, Aasha Keshwala, Hina Bhatt, Raka Panda, MD Mussthafa, Rashesh Chauhan, Simran Chowdhury, Subhasmita Ghadei, and Suraj Kamble, explore the buried stories confronting uncomfortable truths and uncovering unexpected beauty in the discarded.

The exhibition Necropolis of Remains reflects on the politics and economics of waste, a reminder that garbage is never neutral. It is shaped by systems of inequality, power, and profit. Who owns the waste? Who benefits from it? And who bears its cost?