CURRENT EXHIBITION AT THE CAFE...

CONTEXTOMY | Rick Hirtle

Contextomy refers to an style of quoting in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning. In this series a similar practice has been applied by removing a subject from its surrounding in such a way as to obscure the original context. Thus everyday peculiarities become laden with mystery, comedy or even vulgarity. It’s on this basis that Rick has built a collection of images that include such varying subjects as a visa office bathroom in Hong Kong, a lone cow in a desolate stretch of the Australian outback, a handicapped person in Tokyo, an armed drunken man in China, a stray cat on a Mumbai commuter train and other pictures mashed together to present stories that are intriguing but far from obvious.

About the artist... Rick Hirtle is a professional documentary and commercial photographer from Toronto, Canada who specializes in making unrestricted images with a focus on social outsiders and human issues. He has traveled extensively around the globe in pursuit of his personal work. His photographs have appeared in countless exhibitions in Australia, Asia and North America. Most recently in the Born Into This Show presented by the Scion Automotive Corporation in Toronto, Canada. For more please visit www.rickhirtle.com

ABANDONED | Deepshikha Jain

About the series…
In 1988, the building project of the City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) of Maharashtra state commissioned the office of architect Raj Rewal to design 1048 housing units. Despite a very low budget Rewal set out to develop a home environment that was simple and of high quality.
The site of the project is hilly, and unlike most other developments in New Mumbai, it has been designed embracing the terrain rather than trying to defeat it. For this reason it has been considered an important architectural example in a city where the design of public housing is driven solely by the ability to accommodate density.
23 years later, many of the units remain vacant. Most are facing practical problems of leakages, inadequate light and ventilation in houses, unused open spaces, lack of transportation, lack of medical facilities, etc.  Since the Income Tax department bought most of the buildings, this colony was nicknamed the Income Tax Colony.
These pictures are not the entire story, they are just a part to create awareness and re-tell a forgotten tale. Abandoned spaces are a postlude to a life once lived and therefore make for good stories. There is no intention to document this structure. This on the contrary is the photographer’s own artistic expression.
Abandoned, whilst capturing the mood of the space, does raise the inevitable question about why such a well-intentioned and designed project has come to be largely unoccupied and fallen to disrepair, in a city severely lacking in low cost housing.
Deepshikha Jain
After graduating in Architecture from Bombay, Deepshikha Jain pursued a Master’s in Photography from Paris. She can easily be seen as a hybrid, having embraced one world without abandoning the other. She has exhibited in the Paris gallery Chambre Avec Vues and has toured widely across France and India capturing Le- Corbusier’s works. She has also traveled widely across Africa and Europe, at times just to see why a certain piece of Architecture is so rated and at times to be mesmerized by it.

For print sales please ask at the café or contact Deepshikha on 098198 51510 / ar.deepshikhajain@gmail.com

part one | Gitanjali Dang

In the back room, part one by Gitanjali Dang. May 29th to June 2nd

and in the other back room...

Guerilla Store (On until 7th June 2011)

The current show is an exhibition by Obataimu Design Studio in concert with the café.

A little about Obataimu:
Obataimu Studio is a multidisciplinary team of tailors, artisans, a graphic artist, a strategist, a textile innovator, a creative writer, and the product designer/creative director.
The studio makes concept furniture and multi-functional clothing focused on cuts, fabrics, and wearable style. The furniture falls und...er the design-art movement, each one is commissioned like art pieces. Obataimu also designs lighting with a duchampian flavor.

A bit about the show:
The show is a preview of their men's fabrics and concepts. Taking men's lifestyle seriously, whilst implementing it with a tinge of humour.

Some of the interesting products on display:
-Wide range of very wearable menswear made from natural Indian fabrics such as super soft cottons. A tailor is on hand until 1800 daily for custom work and alterations.
-Recycled Fishskin covered polaroid camera. Obataimu is working with 'The Impossible Project' to revive polaroid instant film use in India.
-The KGC's alternative transport policy is already well known established (cycle in on a Sunday and get a free coffee). Obataimu and the KGC are working on custom versions of the classic Indian men's bicycle for the design-consious. An early prototype is on display at the show.
-There's also a selection of Obataimu's preferred reading material in the form of books and periodicals, especially put together for the show.

Dream Mumbai

Kainaz Amaria. From 13th October 2010 to 12th December 2010

Dream Mumbai is a photography project which began organically, almost out of a survival instinct. When I arrived in Mumbai my senses were on overload and being a photojournalist it only heightened this emotion. New city. New language. New smells. New sights. It is a place of constant contradictions. The city can fill and crush your soul in the very same moment. There is no where in the world quite like Mumbai.
I felt like a child when I first arrived. Even the simplest of tasks - crossing the street or buying a piece of fruit - struck me with a tinge of terror. In order to acclimate myself I got into the habit of taking long walks, sometimes well over four hours. A bit like shock therapy I suppose. It was an easy way to observe, learn the roads and feel closer to the people. Everywhere I went the camera came with me. The walks made me familiar with my neighboring geography. The images helped me understand the people living in the neighborhoods.

Collectively the images became a visual diary - pixel memories, but also a statement on the complexities of a developing dreamland.
They offer a glimpse of the variety of daily emotions one can witness whilst walking the streets of Mumbai.

artist statement
Kainaz holds a B.A. in international relations and political science from Boston University and an M.A. in photography from the School of Visual Communication, Ohio University. She has completed photographic and political internships at the St. Petersburg Times, in St. Petersburg, Fla., US News & World Report in Washington D.C., the Journal Star in Lincoln, Neb., at the House of Commons in London, England and at Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s office in Boston, Mass.

Her photographic images and multimedia have been recognized by contests including College Photographer of the Year, Women in Photojournalism, Atlanta Photojournalism Conference, the Nations Press Photographers’ Contest and the South Asian Journalists Association. She was named a Chips Quin Scholar in 2007 and was a graduate teaching assistant at Ohio University.

In 2009, Kainaz was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship, to work on a nine-month project documenting the Parsi community in Mumbai, India. Soon after her arrival, “Dream Mumbai” began - as a daily visual diary of her surroundings.
It was her love of culture, travel, photography and politics that brought her to photojournalism. It is the daily humanity she continues to witness that keeps her here.

PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS...

"Flex, Feroze!"

An exhibition of photo prints by Aparna Jayakumar

27th August to 12th October 2010

The Parsis of Mumbai are a social people. They have a packed calendar, and can be seen at agiaries and charitable gatherings, weddings and navjotes, at the race-courses and at shareholder meetings, at Parsi panchayat meetings and elections. Once a year they turn up in their numbers at Rustom Baug, for the Annual Zoroastrian Power-Lifting and Bodybuilding Championship, open only to Parsi musclemen (and women) from all over the country.

This set of photographs of Parsis by Aparna Jayakumar, taken earlier this year at the ninth edition of the competition, is a celebration both of community (sometimes thought to be in decline) and of the body (clearly in good shape). The pictures record the animation of muscular bodies, but also that of the human face as it watches and sometimes wanders: they catch a Feroze as he flexes those biceps that have been in training all year long for this day, but also perhaps a Jamshed as he suddenly remembers hanging out with Freny on Marine Drive on a winter evening in 1965.

The photographs show an awareness that any public event involves not just an audience watching the actors, but also the actors watching the audience, and taking their cues from them. Casting their net widely about the scene of the event, they construct a narrative that roves back and forth across the line of the stage, creating a palpable sense of intimacy and drama. Parsis young and old, happy and gloomy, flexed and at ease, fill these photographs with their myriad looks and emotions.

Chandrahas Choudhury
August 2010

Aparna Jayakumar is a photographer living and working in Bombay. She has spent a better part of this year working on a book about Bombay's relationship with the black-and-yellow Padmini taxi.

Title Courtesy:  Farida Hussain
Poster Design: Meetesh Taneja / Pinky Akola

Prints from the series are available in limited editions of 10 in the following sizes:
18 cm x 28 cm &
23 cm x 35.5 cm

For enquiries contact: info@kgcafe.in or ask at the café

Ally Reeves is a Fulbright Scholar from Pittsburgh, PA working in Mumbai. A Contextual artist, her work mixes research and traditional arts practice to produce rich imagery.

Charting the Informal Terrain… is a mixed-media body of work created by Ally Reeves that explores the possibilities of artists as researchers and freelance sculptors of urban space. Reeves offers a new perspective on a social and economic section of Indian society that’s seen as essential one minute and obnoxious the next: Mumbai’s 300,000+ street vendors.

Reeves’ work responds to stero-types, pop media portrayals, and one-on-one interviews with hawkers and their customers. Bright photographic and digital prints portray the street vendors ideally: as ostentatious characters that color the cities footpaths, who are hard working citizens, well loved by their customers. However, quotes from vendors themselves, the tiring nature of their repetitive work, exposure them to the elements, and meager earnings, admit to the all-to-real poverty and hardships that many street vendors face on a daily basis.
With the best of intentions, Reeves confronts viewers with the romanticism such images evoke, and shares the challenging truths that underlie simple assumptions. A beautiful and heartening story is present, though it is different from the one a viewer might expect at first glance. Reeves’ vendors are human, enduring, and self-aware; here in beauty emerges from wax idols, kulfi and 5 rupee chais.

TEJAL SHAH EXHIBITION

Kala Ghoda Café in collaboration with gallery Project 88 presents part of the Cityscape series by artist Tejal Shah at the café from 23rd May, 2010 onwards.

Shot at the turn of the millennium, the photographs in the Cityscape series are verses from an elegy to the city of Melbourne, where the artist spent two years as part of her undergraduate degree. In a final good-bye, the artist gropes in the liminal hour to give shape to her feelings and experiences in & of this place. She takes her camera out for a walk every day at dusk - the melancholic hour. Without using a tripod or other supports, she holds up her manual camera that is as old as her, both born in ’79, and opens the aperture, her third eye, to let the light in for several seconds, sometimes over a minute.

As she does this, the imperceptible movements of her breathing and heaving hands and in that sense, the very presence of her being is recorded on film. The resulting photograph then is as much what we see as what we'll never be able to see;the artist in flesh and blood, in the act of capturing. The trails of light or the errant man-made structures that seem to shake and vibrate are not as such because the lights or the buildings were moving at the time of photographing, but because the artist moved.

“Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except…”
(from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino)

Incidentally, in these rather lonely scapes not a single human being appears. The images remark the presence of absence.

Opens May 23, 2010
On view till July 4, 2010

Opening Hours: 0900 to 2345

Cityscape series is comprised of 8 images in total. For any sales enquires please contact Zakia at the gallery Project 88, BMP Building, Ground Floor, N.A. Sawant Marg, Near Colaba Fire Station, Colaba, Mumbai - 400 005; T +91 22 2281 0066/0099; F +91 22 2281 0099; E- contact@project88.in; www.project88.in

PAST EXHIBITIONS AT THE CAFE

LEISURE LANDSCAPES
Farhad Bomanjee

February, March 2010

A series of colour pictures exploring the recreational landscapes in different places. Of initial interest here is the overall landscape and often – the spacing between people. On closer inspection though, many more details become apparent. Such as the pug-owners club at a Tokyo beach on a Sunday morning; or the honeymooning couple experiencing snow for the first time in Himachal; or the baseball in mid-flight at Tokyo Dome stadium with thousands of spectators observed from above…

The prints from this series are available as singles of an edition of 10 (+ 2 artist proofs), titled and signed with edition number, printed on archival Epson paper with archival inks. Size: 54cm x 54cm - (As currently on display at the KGC).