Fifty-eight artworks walk into a derelict bar. And the punchline is in the peeling walls that once witnessed many a tipsy Delhi reveller, far from the white-cube echo chambers where ‘important art’ is usually quarantined. “Everything was feeling a little boring for us, and we wanted to shake things up,” reminisces co-curator Reha Sodhi. “Once we walked into this space last September—despite it being a logistical nightmare—we knew it was it,” co-curator Amit Kumar Jain chimes in.
The erstwhile nightclub in Delhi’s Connaught Place, with its Indo-Saracenic façade, is now freeze-dried into a provisional platform titled ‘The Radial’—“a space for ideas and encounters to collide, where the process matters more than the finish line.” The exhibit, inspired by Sudarshan Shetty’s namesake kinetic installation featuring a pair of mechanical hammers threatening to break a table full of cocktail glasses, is dutifully dubbed ‘Party is Elsewhere.’
As you enter through an Art Deco-esque door, walking over black and white chevron flooring, Shetty’s seminal work welcomes you in. The piece greets you with a red neon sign, while its simultaneous thuds make you flinch instinctively—feeling like an ongoing renovation project as you explore the exhibit further. “First shown in a Mumbai gallery in 2005 that was later destroyed by fire, the piece often blurs the line between the exhibition space and the street,” says Sodhi. “This was his statement towards the anxiety of the existing art scene,” she adds. The rest of the show begins with Jeram Patel’s enamel paint and blowtorch wood-carving. Track lights fit for a pristine gallery illuminate the rooms along with club lights, while cloudy glass windows with frames that were once ivory white look out to the bustling neighbourhood.
Soon, Subodh Gupta’s burnt-wick collage and Alwar Balasubramaniam’s evaporating camphor sculpture open a dialogue on permanence. Nearby, archival intaglio prints by Zarina Hashmi and Krishna Reddy, from their time at Paris’s influential Atelier 17 in the 60s, sit comfortably beside works of artists who are alive. “It’s risky to have archival pieces here,” curator Amit Kumar Jain notes, gesturing toward a partially collapsed ceiling, “but we are responding to that decay.”
Death and memory haunt the transition. One of Jitish Kallat’s earliest works reconnoitres mortality, while a Mehlli Gobhai canvas leads into a section cordoned off with red tape. Here, the grimy tiles of what used to be the bar kitchen meet the 1,400 framed photographs with Vivan Sundaram’s ‘The Great Indian Bazaar.’ The sombre scene is ruptured only by the vibrant colorburst of a Bharti Kher painting.
The chevron floors appear again, interacting with Ayesha Sultana’s exploration of the pattern in graphite this time. A dilapidated nook, once home to some sort of electrical equipment, creates a cosy corner for Kritka Kain’s piece made with gold leaf and reused silk screen. The space’s architectural ghosts remain omnipresent all along. Behind a now-brutalist bar counter, hands of Raqs Media Collective’s ominous clock navigate between words like "nostalgia" and "fatigue," mirrored by another timepiece in Atul Dodiya’s oil-on-canvas interpretation of a scene from Padosan (1968). Shovan Gandhi’s backlit work of Okinawa’s Naha Civic Hall looms above Sunil Gawde’s crescent of blades, flanked by sculptures from Himmat Shah and Sankho Chaudhuri.
A stairway, illuminated only by Shilpa Gupta’s pencil sketches on lightboxes, leads to a second level. Susanta Mandal’s mechanical contraption—complete with a claw designed to burst soap bubbles it creates—dominates a dingy corner, while Atul Dodiya’s motorised shutters, born after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, headline the next section. What looks like an endless number of toy TVs now crowd the room as Sheeba Chhachhi’s ‘The Mermaid’s Mirror’ explores the life and work of Meena Kumari through film stills. Within a skeleton of one of the bathrooms, a striking blue work of Gandhi’s speaks of preservation and reinvention. The space is peppered with works by Mithu Sen, Nalani Malani and T. Venkanna.
Through a passage of scarlet lights, Rana Begum’s titanic stainless-steel origami unfolds near Idris Khan’s ‘TBT’ with its blue surface pricked by countless points of devotion after his return from Hajj. In this final room, Gandhi’s nebulous photographs of Milan’s Mudec Museum (which was once an army barracks) record the friction of urban metamorphosis. These sites sit in conversation with Monika Correa’s textiles, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes, and Mrinalini Mukherjee’s bronze ‘Nucleus VIII.’ By the time you’ve taken it all in, another stairway leads to a dead end with a scrolling LED sign by Himanshu S. It spells a haunting provocation: “Keep in Circulation the Rumour that God is Alive.”
In this reconsidered pub, the party persists through a rhythmic sequence of art that honours the afterlife of a space. It’s hard to find tombstones beside the artworks—probably intentionally so—allowing a sense of immersion that is uninterrupted by details that are inconsequential to the larger scheme of things. Supported by the Devi Art Foundation, this India Art Fair Parallel exhibit serves as a swan song—offering a quiet, contemplative rebellion against the breakneck gentrification of art and architecture.
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