For French photographer Philippe Calia, Mumbai is the muse for his solo show, as he explores its myths, illusions and poetry, including Kolatkar and the Bombay Poets
Atemporal Creatures (Bombay Natural History Society), 2024
As I play/The city slowly reconstructs itself/Numbered stone by numbered stone,…’ wrote Arun Kolatkar in his famed Kala Ghoda poems. Not much has changed. “There is an impermanence that permeates through the city,” admits photographer and artist Philippe Calia. The Paris-born artist’s latest show, The Second Law that opens this week has a deep-rooted connection with the city, and Mumbai’s very own poet icon, Kolatkar.
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Arun Kolatkar. Pic Courtesy/Wikimedia Commons
“The show’s journey began in 2011,” shares Calia, recalling the first year of his arrival in the city of Mumbai. Moving to Borivli, he would often spend time roaming around the city, photographing its many forms. “It was only in 2015-16 that I began putting together these photographs and videos in an attempt to make sense of them,” he reveals.
Pas de Deux (Jayanthi’s translation)
It was also during this time that he discovered the Bombay Poets, and Arun Kolatkar in particular. “The encounter with the works of Kolatkar was quite decisive for me, in particular with his Kala Ghoda poems. I was sensitive to his visions of the city, the objects and the potential beauty of the mundane. It also helped me build an understanding of the city,” he says.
Decisive Arrangement (with Mahek and Kalim), 2024
Evoking found objects and installations through photography, text and video, Calia seeks to shape Mumbai’s persona. He views the city as illusory by nature. “One day things are present; the next day they disappear. Photography and art is an attempt to freeze the moment and give it a certain shape, even as reality tends towards decay and inevitability,” shares the artist.
The show will feature Calia’s street photography countered against set photographs within familiar city spaces like the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and Capitol Cinema. “It is like a window into the subconscious of the city where the familiar and unfamiliar are juxtaposed improbably, the way dreams appear to us,” he explains.
Three Times, 2024. Pics Courtesy/Philippe Calia and Tarq
The experimentation is not limited to the visual experience. Poetry also adds to the exploration. A key installation is the translations of Kolatkar’s poem, The Pattern. On one level, Calia wished to evoke the motif of the recurring pattern visually. “This installation is made of over a hundred small photographs that embody the recurring pattern. And yet, each photograph will also show you a marked difference in those patterns,” he points out.
A view of the Kala Ghoda precinct. File pic
The second level is achieved through an exploration of the city’s subconscious. He got the poem translated from English to Hindi, from Hindi to Gujarati and so on by legal writers across the Fort district — a nod to the gallery’s Fort location. It also resulted in poems that turned Kolatkar’s verses into something new, an homage. In his artist text, Calia writes, “In cities like Bombay, the everyday is experienced through multiple languages, in the form of jumps, cuts, assemblage, collage, bricolage, sometimes within the same word…The idealist — some would say nostalgic — can thus proclaim that translation is Bombay’s official language.”
Philippe Calia
Push him further, he laughs saying, “Being French, I remember reading Vile Parle on the station signboard, and translating it to ‘*city speaks’ in French.” In the end, the show reflects the city’s own surreal nature. Scalia concludes, “It raises the question of Mumbai as Mayanagari — what is real or unreal? Photography is the perfect medium to raise this question, since it enables us to create a distance from the photographed phenomena and reflect upon the question.”
FROM February 27 to March 29; 11 am to 6.30 pm
AT Tarq, KK Navsari Chambers, ground floor, Fort.
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