India Art Fair

This artwork is an intervention in the form of a sculptural installation. The sculpture portrays the current orientation of Mumbai’s landscape and is composed of an older map of the seven original islands that made up Mumbai’s topography as well as barricade like fish drying racks and a rubber floor. The racks are populated with Bombay Duck fish cast in concrete and the floor is made of silicon rubber with bas relief motifs of local marine. Audiences are invited to interact with the work by walking through the map of the city, barefoot over the silicon surface. The artist forces them to confront the impact that greed has had on our ecology. 

 

Parag has used Bombay Duck as it is a staple in the diet of the Kolis (indigenous local fisherfolk of the seven islands of Mumbai). With developmental and industrialisation projects encroaching on the ancient fishing grounds inhabited by the Kolis, the artist has turned to Bombay Duck as a symbol of loss. It is said that the supply of fish on these seven islands was once so rich that the excess catch was dried and stored as food security. But now this Bombil (local name for Bombay Duck) is searching for a new habitat. The reason for this migration and depletion, according to local fisherfolk and scientists, is polluted saline bodies and reclamation of coastal areas which has destroyed the food pyramid of local fish species. 

 

Until the 1800s, Mumbai was an archipelago of seven small islands, inhabited by the indigenous fisherfolk community. These indigenous tribes of the seven islands are now struggling like the ocean and the estuaries around them because of metropolitan pollutants from the ever-growing megalopolis in their fishing grounds and villages. Their coastal villages are now being seen as a land of opportunity, with many builders looking to their lands as prime properties. The constant reclamation of the ocean has had an unfavourable effect on the local indigenous fisherfolk. This interactive sculpture with concrete structures placed on soft rubber flooring is representative of these encroachments into the forest land of the Kolis who believe that the ocean is a forest, an infinite forest within forests.