The FOCUS photography festival is a bi-annual event across galleries in Mumbai. It is the result of a group of committed individuals coming together to engage a larger audience across the city. In its second year, the festival had already grown to twice its size. We were commissioned to design and build a temporary gallery space for the “Call for entries” show.
In 2015 the theme of the festival was ‘CROSSOVER’. The city of Mumbai is a great setting, having such fast paced change and diversity. The festival this year celebrates photography’s role in challenging our view of our perceived environment, as well as chronicling and exploring ourselves in this dynamic world.
The organizers of the festival met us late 2014, and were in talks with potential sites for the show. The first one being Carter Road, Bandra. Carter road is a scenic promenade by the sea with thickets of mangroves allowing only short glimpses toward the sea, the path meanders along the coastline to on across a superb panorama of fishing village to rock concert venue. We envisioned a series of enclosed pavilions that would bring in the viewer, and then take them along predisposed path by framing views to the next pavilions. The pavilions themselves would be of a translucent net-like material that would bring in ample soft light, yet be cool in the day. At night these would be lit up to glow like a line of lanterns if seen from the sea. Cater road was finally not possible, though in our post-exhibition banter we have all been very excited about taking it up during the 2017 show.
The venues then shifted to Worli Seaface, The Prince of wales museum, and finally the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad museum at Byculla. The museum, formerly the Victoria and Albert museum, was the first museum for the city of Bombay. The museum showcases the city’s cultural heritage and history through a rare collection of Fine and Decorative Arts that highlight Early Modern Art practices as well as the craftsmanship of various communities of the Bombay Presidency. We saw this as a perfect setting for the show.
The gallery was to be built in the museum plaza, under the canopy of the trees. We envisioned a space that wound in and around the jackfruit, ashoka, coconut palm, gulmohur and mango trees. There also was a canopy on site, built for the BMW Guggenheim lab in 2012. The curator, Pa Madhavan and festival director, Nicola Antaki collaborated with us in organising the flow of the images along the spaces we had designated among the trees.
Each artist’s work would be displayed in a their individual space, our idea for the space itself was a differential viewing experience based on the viewer’s visual focus. A person standing inside could very well feel lost in the images, but a short shift in gaze and focus would bring you out of the space and into the trees and the surrounding plaza. To acheive this, we brought back the same material pallette from the carter road proposal, steel frames, and agricultural shadenet. Each space was made up of one or more eight foot square panel, with a net infill, bolted to a four by eight open panel with the artist’s description. The frames were this height to ensure a disconnect from the surrounding plaza, and bring one into the world of the photograph. They would also be lifted slightly off the ground to ground the viewer, and for accurate levelling. This was done with nuts and bolts.
The images were fixed onto the net itself for speed of installation. We prefer mechanical connections over adhesive ones, this project proved our fears true. The fixing of the images proved much harder than we expected, owing to unexpected intense heat, rain, and human error. We tried various tapes and glues, even adhesive that is used to stick roof. Finally, a hole was punched in each corner of the image and everything was fastened securely.
We loved the response to this show, and the democracy of it’s location. We are proud to have been a part of FOCUS 2015, and have learnt immensely from it. We are now finding ways to support the arts even further in our city, and country.
Architecture+Design 