The KALAGHODA.PROJECT was displayed at Chemould, Kalaghoda, Mumbai, 2005 February, in the exhibition proposing public sculpture at Kalaghoda.

After that, this Blog has not been used.

Let this Blog be a public place.

---- lets have adda---



Please email at kau6newmail@gmail.com

I will send you an invite to join

Photo credit: Priyadarshi Srivastav of krvia

Have been toying with the idea for a long time ever since Kausik talked about a public sculpture project at ‘kala ghora’ some time back………. By the way is it the parking lot or the whole of the area including the Prince of Wales museum, the NGMA, the footpath around……….etc that is kala ghora (the black horse!). That brings me to the point which public are we talking about ………those who visit the arty happenings or is it the ever busy passer-by unnamed and faceless.

Well how about a park there with benches to seat on (please for heaven sake not the ones sliced for keeping up the moral ethics of our great Indian values!) Wouldn’t mind a couple of affordable tea stalls too. The idea of a little green space accessible to public is very tempting and of course the just the thought of resting my legs………as for the parking lot, let the architects think up a basement!

the real public art -sponsored by ......

i was in kalaghoda yesterday.. the festival begins today.
they have removed all the postcard and trinket sellers outside the museum.
'gatewayed' the pavement and colonized it with a 'food court'.
sponsored by 'thums up'.

thums down..

Kala in Bengali means banana also

heres a graveyard we designed a while ago at college
Its a graveyard for failed projects
Maybe it can be a graveyard for failed comments. 

'kala' ghoda?

Maybe the art district is not so much of a construct after all. Maybe we have been the victims of a very long misunderstanding. Consider: If KALA of kalaghoda is pronounced not as 'Kaala', but just 'Kala', it means art!! The idea boggles the old mind! Maybe the British pronounced it all wrong, and the present art district is merely bringing what was kept away from us for such a long time! Long live the artistic horse/horsey artist!

City planning only understands – legal/illegal, public/private, theirs/ours, there is no space between that. Only way to clean is to use force – there is no provision for planning other than that.

Demolish and built

Or

Preserve and clean

Heritage buildings are cleaned of all the things that got added on it as if those are unhistorical and there is a true history hidden beneath it.

the grave of all arty facts

some thoughts on the basement..
preservation for posterity under the ground.. like a graveyard
dead but still remembered
and capable of being resurrected- when the need strikes-
like secret weapons
- the basketball court in the xavier academy.. opening to reveal the x-men jet..
this urge to record and recall- i wonder what kind of history it will write..

and here i quote from robert graves' 'i, claudius'

there are two kinds of histories:
ones that inspire mankind to virtue; and
ones that inspire mankind to truth..

i wonder what kind of history the conservation movement (or the 'art district') prefers..

basement parking

ok
i know i have been bad- really bad..
been trying to figure something out for the space.. and everything that i can figure out is so, i dont know - been there already- done that already.. and that too in the same space..
comments on the 'horse' - the elusive one thats now in the zoo.. the symbolism of the horse - machismo etc etc.. or the one about the concept of the 'art district'- good marketing.. loved kausik and paul piece years back about it. miss seeing it again.. in fact miss seeing a lot of things that once happened there.. and since we freeze our cities for preservations sake- maybe we should freeze out comments on it too- they will continue to be relevant for posterity..
a multi layered expanidible basement i think... underneath the entire parking lot.. that collects all the pieces created for the festival.. u think?

i remember the architect of the kalaghoda art-district saying once- to a suggestion that there should be spitoons as part of this areas street furniture...
"spitoons!!! do we really need them? such a disgusting habit! who cleans the spitoons anyways?"
so i am putting my drawing of garbagebin/communitity space for dogs crows and flies...

Public Space for Dogs and Crows and Flies 

Culture on Tap 

power symbol?

Traditionally the public sculptures are large and it is about the power, power that puts it there. Can that be subverted? Does the scale have to do with it? Suppose there is a commission, would the only way be to refuse it? Even in imagination, does the act of just installing it, makes it a power symbol?

. 

Public?

In my mind the idea of an 'art festival' is in direct contradiction with the idea of Public Space. Although an art festival generates activity, the whole thing being curated becomes a space of dissemination of culture by the people with the power to assume what culture is. Nothing Ridiculous can happen in an art festival. Should something ridiculous be conceived, by a ridiculous person, it would be struck of the list of carefully selected, incredibly well written, works that are to be displayed.
Public space to me, is that space where people can perform their ridiculous ideas at leisure and the only oppossition they receive is no support from their surroundings.
From the location to the curation to the dissemination Kala Ghoda is culture on tap.

Found this photo in the studio. Nayan clicked it few years back. I often imagine the place this way but hardly ever saw this view in reality.
 

having a bash?

There is a trill in the uncertainty and that might be the fun of this project.

Expecting to put this blog as the project for Kalaghoda public sculpture in the gallery.

By the way what exactly is the boundary of Kalaghoda?
Saurabh said, that area increase with the increase in the number of the art lovers. Does it decrease too?
So where would the sculpture be if one wants to make a sculpture at all?
My first reaction is of guilt to make a sculpture in a contested domain. But is the area contested or the struggle is over and the contest resides in the mind of the intellectuals who conjures up reality to suit their purpose? Or would I react with sarcasm? Isn’t sarcasm a defeat?

exhibition dates

A mail from Shireen, Chemould,

Hi Dear,

Just please make a note that the exhibition dates of Kala Ghoda are the 15^th to 23^rd January & not 17^th Jan.

Sorry for the inconvenience,

Regards,

Shireen

The one and only...

This is the original kala ghoda. It is now located in the VJBUZ. Why is this horse important to this project at all?, one may ask. I think it is. Because it represents all that we have constructed as valuable in the Kalaghoda precint. Our stately British heritage, our subversive name for it, and the ablity for a name to represent much more than just initial image. Possibly for that same reason it is absolutely irrelavant for this statue to appear here. I think that cities are connected across geography by imagination. Different people use different spaces in different ways but threads of random violences/displacements stretch across space, connecting them through underground (for lack of a better word) imaginations. Whether or not the statue has place in the parking lot that dominates the area is irrelevant, my question is, has the space freed itself from all that this statue represents?

bang

An invitation

An invitation from Sheerin to participate in an exhibition of ideas for a public sculpture at Kalaghoda (Black Horse) got me thinking about its nature and meaning.

Having a group of young architects researching on Bombay/Mumbai whom I can ask for help in the uncertainty regarding the public nature of my sculpture and nature of public spaces I decided to launch a blog as a communication device and a chronological record of the discussion that I expect to take place.