Multipolis Mumbai: Art and Architecture in the city

Sudhir Patwardhan was born in Pune in 1949. He graduated in medicine and worked as a Radiologist in the city of Thane, near Mumbai from 1975 to 2005. He took to art seriously while in medical college. Since 1979 his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has received wide critical as well as popular acclaim. He is an occasional writer and lecturer on art, and also a curator who has focused on introducing new audiences to contemporary art. In 2008 – 2009 he organised ‘Expanding Horizons’ an exhibition of thirty important contemporary artists and travelled with it to eight cities in Maharashtra, along with lectures, seminars and film shows on art. Apart from exhibition catalogues, five books on the artist’s work have been published. ‘The Complicit Observer’ The Art of Sudhir Patwardhan, by Ranjit Hoskote 2004 (Sakshi Gallery and Eminence Designs); ‘Chitrakar Sudhir Patwardhan’ (in Marathi) by Padmakar Kulkarni 2005 (Lokvangmay Grih); ‘The Crafting of Reality, Sudhir Patwardhan: Drawings’ by Ranjit Hoskote 2007 (The Guild); ‘Rekhachitravichar’, Marathi translation of ‘The Crafting of Reality’ by Dilip Ranade, 2012 (Popular Prakashan); and ‘Hamsafar’ with an essay by R. Siva Kumar in English and by Vijay Kumar in Hindi, 2018 (Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, and The Guild). The artist lives and works in Thane, near Mumbai.

Ranjit Kandalgaonkar lives and works in Mumbai and his art practice primarily comprises a lens directed at the urban context of cities. Projects such as ‘cityinflux’, ‘Gentricity’, 'build/browse' and ‘Stories of Philanthropic Trusts’ map vulnerability within redevelopment strategies of urbanisation or record timelines and ‘blindspots’ – alternate markers of a city that’s unravelling. A study of combative histories of reclamation and speculation have led to projects such as 'Isles amidst reclamation' and 'Seven Isles unclaimed'. Another decade-long project recording ship-breaking practices at Alang, Gujarat have led to the exhibition ‘Shipping & the Shipped’ – showcased at the Bergen Assembly, Art & Research Triennial in 2016 and subsequently at ‘Sea Change’ – Colomboscope in 2019. Awards & grants include Majlis Visual Arts Fellowship, UDRI Fellowship, Leverhulme Artist Residency, Harvard University SAI Artist Residency, Seed Funding Award – Wellcome Trust and a Gasworks Artist Residency in collaboration with Wellcome Collections in 2017 for which he produced an interactive drawing depicting his research on the Bombay plague of 1896.

Sameer Kulavoor (b.1983) lives and works in Mumbai, India. His work lies at the intersection of art, graphic design & contemporary illustration and has taken the form of paintings, murals, books, zines, prints and objects. He is interested in why things look the way they do; constantly exploring and understanding the impact that time, culture, politics and socio-economic conditions have on our visible and invisible surroundings. In this age of visual overload, his work involves filtering, dissecting, documenting and defamiliarising commonly seen subjects through the act of drawing, painting and design. Some of the zines he has produced include Sidewalks & Coffeeshops (2009), Zeroxwallah Zine (2011), The Ghoda Cycle Project (poster-book, 2012), Blued (book/zine, 2013) and Oh Flip (flipbooks, 2013). He exhibited The Ghoda Cycle Project at WDC Helsinki in 2012 and in Mumbai in 2013 while also collaborating with Paul Smith on a series of Ghoda Cycle Tee-shirt designs which were released worldwide. He presented select sketchbook drawings from between 2012 and 2016 as large serigraphs at Artisans’, Kalaghoda, in a show titled ‘Please Have A Seat’ (2016). He has been working on a number of large-scale public art projects and paintings which are on view in Auckland (New Zealand), Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi and Chennai. ‘A Man of the Crowd’ (2018) was Kulavoor’s first solo presentation at TARQ. Two of his new works were showcased at the TARQ booth group show at India Art Fair in 2019. Most recently, his drawings and paintings were part of ‘The Shifting City’ – Mumbai pavilion of ‘Making Heimat – Arrival City’ at the Goethe Institut Max Mueller Bhavan curated by Kaiwan Mehta. Kulavoor was the founder of Bombay Duck Designs which is presently directed by graphic artist + urdu/arabic typography specialist, Zeenat Kulavoor. Along with artist/designer Lokesh Karekar (Locopopo), Kulavoor also founded and curated six issues of 100%ZINE (currently on hiatus) – a visual arts magazine that discovers and showcases a wide range of visual art talent from India and abroad. He is represented in India by TARQ Mumbai.

Neera Adarkar is a practicing architect and an urbanist based in Mumbai. A graduate from from Sir J. J. College of Architecture, Neera has been awarded Honorary Doctorate by the department of Urban planning, Urbanism and Architecture of the Katholieke University, Belgium. Neera is running a joint practice under Adarkar Associates, engaged in architecture, planning, conservation and urban research. Neera’s work emerges from deep concern of social, urban and gender issues. She is one of the founder trustees of the School of Environment and Architecture, a graduate school of architecture in Mumbai. She has co-authored with Meena Menon ‘One Hundred Years One Hundred Voices: Oral History of Millworkers of Girangaon’ (2004) and has edited an anthology: ‘The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life’ (2011). ‘MultiliCities: Urban Cultures of Mumbai Metropolitan Region‘ is a forthcoming volume authored by Neera Adarkar and published by the Heritage Conservation Society of MMRDA.

Kaiwan Mehta, is a theorist and critic in the fields of visual culture, architecture, and city studies. Mehta has studied Architecture (B. Arch), Literature (MA), Indian Aesthetics (PGDip) and Cultural Studies (PhD). In 2017 he completed his doctoral studies at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru, under the aegis of Manipal University.Since March 2012 he has been the Managing Editor of Domus India (Spenta Multimedia). He is also Professor and coordinator of the Doctoral Programme at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad since 2017; and part of the CEPT University Press since 2018. He was the Charles Correa Chair professor at the Goa College of Architecture under the aegis of the Department of Art and Culture, Government of Goa for the academic year 2017-2018. He authored Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood (Yoda Press. New Delhi, 2009) and The Architecture of I M Kadri (Niyogi. New Delhi, 2016). He has delivered keynote lectures and seminars at Cornell University, Centre Pompidou, Paris, besides other Indian and international universities, institutions, museums, and organisations; and has also contributed a section on Modern and Contemporary architecture in India and South-Asia for the forthcoming and updated edition of Bannister Fletcher's "A History of World Architecture". Mehta co-curated with Rahul Mehrotra and Ranjit Hoskote the national exhibition on architecture – “The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India” (UDRI. 2016) at the National Gallery Modern Art, Mumbai and 'State of Housing - Aspirations, Imaginaries, and Realities in India' (UDRI. 2018). He has been elected as the Jury Chairman for two consecutive terms (2015–17 and 2017–2019) for the international artists’ residency programme across 13 disciplines at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. He has been curating the Urban Design and Architecture section of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Mumbai since 2016.