Explore the vertical views of Mumbai at Sassoon Docks

A view of the installation at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022-23. PICs COURTESY/CAMP

Perhaps the best way to capture Mumbai's cityscape is vertically. For a city whose collective infrastructure stands across multiple layers, life is carried on in between skyscrapers, heritage buildings, informal structures and work-in-progress projects on almost every road. CAMP, a Mumbai-based collaborative studio, brings this view to Sassoon Docks with a seven-screen installation titled Bombay Tilts Down, sharing a critical engagement with CCTV surveillance as a medium re-appropriated for artistic use. The viewing is presented by art gallery Experimenter in collaboration with St+art India Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that creates public art, during Mumbai Gallery Weekend.

The installation is immersive, reiterating unconsciously registered views of the city as some would individually experience it from a vantage point. The seven adjacent screens play a looped video of over 13 minutes, filmed from a single-point location: a CCTV camera from the roof of a 35-floor hotel in Central Mumbai filmed over many months during the COVID-19 pandemic. By changing the hands of control of this surveillance and its purpose, the project creates a lens for and captures new relationships between people, infrastructure, lines and layers in the city.

Cityscapes are consumed or conjured in a panoramic form even today when much of our content has turned vertical. Here, CAMP reimagines this view as a vertical landscape using traditional long-take shots that tilt downwards, conveying a lot of information and building a new narrative of the city. Giving us a view of a shot, Shaina Anand of CAMP shares, "Each shot is a single take that begins in a wide shot, zooms in to a certain point in the city - this could be a building or the horizon, and then begins to drop down. One of the shots begins with Haji Ali Dargah, now surrounded by the Coastal Road project. The camera jerks its head violently, swishes and pans a full 100 degrees to the northeast to the Palais Royale, the city's tallest building that stands on the Shriram Mills compound."

She adds that as the camera goes down the illegal floors of the skyscraper, on the right appears MHADA housing and BDD chawls in the background. "Here, you spot two people standing resolutely on the roof looking back at us, as if to say, ‘We were here yesterday, we will be here tomorrow' You dip down the thin vertical longitudinal strip till you come to the footprint and floor of Shriram Mills. In this vertical slice, you see an incredible amount of detail and a new way to read this landscape," she shares.

Priyanka and Prateek Raja

Music makes up a prominent part of the experience of this installation. It has been composed by Tushar Adhav who goes by the moniker, BamBoy, and who grew up in Lalbaug. The dynamic and bassline-heavy soundtrack comprises songs and poems by city writers including Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Sambhaji Bhagat, Anna Bhau Sathe, Narayan Surve, Shenaz Shaikh and others. One of the seven screens displays the lyrics of the soundtrack.

This year, Experimenter steps into its 15th year. Revealing plans for the year ahead, Priyanka Raja and Prateek Raja, the gallery's directors and co-founders note, "We feel the need to continue to engage deeper within the cities we inhabit and its public spaces. The entire year is marked by our interest in how public spaces can cradle ambitious contemporary programming and how we can continue to grow into the fabric of the communities and spaces that surround our galleries."

Till January 21; 4 pm to 9 pm
At: MNC shed, Fish Market, Sassoon Dock Road, Azad Nagar, Colaba.
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