The Guild Art Gallery

organises and presents

The Street, and the Studio...
A city researcher's Studio moves into the Gallery

Kaiwan Mehta, author of Alice in Bhuleshwar – Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood (Yoda. 2009), Species of Traces: Archaeologies of Journeys (Solitude. 2009) and 13 Tales in the Life and Times of a Stranger (Solitude. 2010) will set up a working studio at The Guild for nine days opening up the situations and annotations that went into the making of his journeys through cities and neighbourhoods, archives and libraries. He will be in the process of preparing notes and sketches for some of the chapters of his forthcoming book Desires in a Dialectic Fairyland: the Life and Times of Cities (Yoda Press).

The studio will specifically focus on collating texts and images for each of the selected chapter-concepts, detailing them with annotations and comments. Mehta has often found the context and structure of an exhibition, and working towards a display of material, as a very enriching process leading towards the development and refinement of research material as well as epistemic concerns. The construction of knowledge that happens in the process of constructing an exhibition, sorting display, either within the private studio space or the public gallery, will be the idea around which this studio is set up. The physical space of the studio, and constructing an argument, or rather sketches for many arguments within the spatial structure of the studio, becomes the crucial working process. Objects of furniture often used in laboratories, shop-fronts or architects’ studios, as well as museums, have entered Mehta’s working space and have been the ready-mades in the structuring of a studio-research space.

Engaging with research and the space of a working studio, exhibition and the archive working-box, this nine-day work in progress will be open to public few hours everyday. Since collaborations and engaging with other people is so much an aspect of Mehta’s work, whether through oral history workshops and walks or the space of a residency, the class room or the studio, certain programmes will engage with these aspects of his research and practice. 

4 to 12 January, 2012
Open for public 5:30 to 7:30 pm / 11:00 am to 7:30 pm on 12 January 

Saturday 7 January --
4:30 pm – Collecting, Seeing; screening of Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries) followed by a discussion with director Kiran Rao 

7:15 pm – As the city burrows out of its sentences; 
readings by cultural theorist and poet Ranjit Hoskote, architect and professor Mustansir Dalvi and Kaiwan Mehta 

Wednesday 11 January --
5:30 pm – Routes and Footprints: The idea of Practice;  
a conversation between artist Shilpa Gupta and cultural theorist and critic Nancy Adajania 

Screening and Reading on 7 January is in collaboration with:
Arbour: Research Initiatives in Architecture and The PEN All-India Centre  

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Address:
The Guild Art Gallery
02/32, Kamal Mansion, 2nd floor,  Arthur Bunder Road, Colaba, Mumbai 400005 
T: + 91 22 2288 0116 / 0195  F: + 91 22 2287 6210
theguildart@yahoo.com / theguildart@gmail.com
www.guildindia.com

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Kaiwan Mehta 
Architect, Author and Urban Researcher

 Author - Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood (Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2009)
Director - Arbour: Research Initiatives in Architecture
Course Director - Art, Criticism and Theory at Jnanapravaha (Mumbai)