‘Dislocation: Milljunction Part 2’

'Dislocation: Milljunction Part 2' by Baiju Parthan takes place at Aicon Gallery, London.

The artist states in his accompanying note: “Mumbai being a cosmopolitan city, consists of a floating population, of immigrants from various parts of the country. Each one of these communities and individuals has their own version of Mumbai as their recollection of getting to know and comprehend Mumbai. The most homogeneous/coherent recollection of Mumbai I have heard is of Bombay as a city of textile mills. During British raj it was called the Manchester of the east because of the textile mills.

The typical Bombay chawl culture and the resulting ethos which get depicted as the Bombay in Bollywood movies belongs to this era of textile mills. (Chawls are one room tenement apartments with a common toilet where the mill workers used to live.) I have chosen to look at the vestiges the fast disappearing mill presence through a handful of icons.

The old fiat taxis which are being phased out, the chawl building where workers used to live, and also the man on the street , mostly the laborer as a vestige of the Mill presence. How the familiar is erased all the time to make way for the new. At the same time it is not nostalgia, but is a lament. Then in 1982 there was a major mill strike and the mills shut down one by one. Today the mill sites and the chawls are being developed into premium residential towers.

Baiju Parthan is especially interested in the influence of technology on religious beliefs, the implications of genetic engineering, and the possibilities of post-humanism (i.e. the development of symbiotic relations between men and machines). He secured his BFA from the Mumbai University, and has hence held successful solo exhibitions in Mumbai, New Delhi and Goa. He has also participated in major group shows in Calcutta, Mumbai, New York and other centers.

(Information courtesy: Aicon Gallery, London)