A show to mark 20 years of Bose Krishnamachari’s illustrious career

It’s a show that marks two decades of an illustrious art career. The new exhibition at Mumbai based Gallery BMB is a revisit to his famous project, LaVA, a traveling library of art related books, DVDs and CDs.

Checking out LaVA is like making one’s way into a ‘dream space’. An art lover will get almost whatever he or she wishes: DVDs, books on film, music albums, cultural and media theory. The exhilaration of meandering through the maze of material on offer is simply indescribable. One is instantly struck by the enormity, quality and depth of the documents on offer.

First staged as a solo a couple of years ago, LaVA comes across as a strong statement. An accompanying note states: “This growing work-in-progress could occur at the three-point interfaces posed by the installation itself, the audience’s behavioral reactions to it at various levels, the possibility for open-ended restructuring within different architectural situations, and the presence of the artist’s intent.”LaVA is part of the intention of building a permanent institution so that visual art, poetry, architecture and design should all combine as cultural forms under one roof.

Being positioned as a contemporary-temporary knowledge laboratory for the people, the archival project comprises 5,000 books and 1,400 DVDs and CDs, culled from museums, institutions, galleries, shops and streets from major art capitals – most of them hand-picked.

He has mentioned: “It’s a critique of the institutions and infrastructure that existed (and continues to exist). I am provoking existing institutions into responding. When people like me could put up a show on such a large scale what was stopping the larger institutions from doing the same. The exhibition is in a way ridiculing them and the rich in this country. They may have the money but they have no vision.

"Take a person like Charles Saatchi who is such a patron of the arts and has a public museum. People like him actively promote art and even if they do not have a background in it, they hire advisors to do the job,” he quips.