Weaving a tangled web

Spider Man fans, we have news for you. The Marvel superhero is not responsible for the massive web hugging the facade of Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai. It’s a work of art by Reena Kallat, who is the first Indian artist to be selected for ZegnArt Public, a project started by the luxury fashion brand Ermenegildo Zegna and supported by Bhau Daji Lad Museum. “I wanted something that looked organic,” said Kallat of her elaborate installation.

Come up close to the museum and you’ll see that the web is made up of outsized rubber stamps that seem to have been strung together. At the bottom of each rubber stamp is the name of a Mumbai road. It may seem like a random selection at first, but turn on your spidey-sense and you’ll notice that the names have something in common: they’re all roads whose colonial names were changed and made to sound indigenous. There are 55 roads that Kallat identified for this project. She says she wanted to explore the idea of how names change a city’s imagination and whether rechristening changes how a space is viewed.

The rubber stamp has appeared in a number of Kallat’s work over the past 10 years. The object intrigues her partly because of it’s shape — “It’s so sculptural,” she said, with a gleam in her eye — but more so because of the associations it has. The rubber stamp immediately brings to mind bureaucratic processes and as a phrase denotes uncritical and almost thoughtless approvals. Kallat wanted all these associations to come into play in the installation. Of course, there’s nothing thoughtless about the work itself.
Reena Kallat’s installation will be up at Bhau Daji Lad
Museum in Jijamata Udyan for the next three months.