TARQ presents World, But No Home curated by Kaiwan Mehta, exploring notions that dovetail between ideas of home, the world and the city. The exhibition comes together as an extension of Mehta’s preoccupation with the theme explored in his book Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood in 2009, which also continued through his doctoral thesis on Architectural Ornament and the Idea of the Neighbourhood.
Mehta writes, “[The exhibition] will try and understand what the experiences of our everyday negotiations are? How do contemporary experiences make for a more nuanced understanding of the spaces we occupy, and how we occupy our own selves embedded in home, in community, in nation, in humanity! Do we need newer forms of knowing our spaces and public-ness? How does the self and the citizen negotiate the quotidian, the everyday in life?”
The last few years have witnessed various shifting cultural and political grounds, prompting negotiations in understanding the personal and the public—from forced ‘homeness’ induced by the pandemic to the simultaneous public protests creating civic communities. Emerging from overt and hurried obsessions with the digital world, the interiority of the gaming world and online communities prevail alongside a plethora of social activities—initiating dialogues around citizenship and civic behavior, through religious parades; communities advocating for nature; LGBTQ clubs; reality shows; and drag performances.
As illustrated by Mehta, “The Home and the World have been the classic binary to understand our spaces of living and the relationships we hold in the social world, with the self as well as with others – the human-self finding threads and anchors, routes and spaces between the two. One has often navigated the city, walked lanes dreamily amidst architectural details, been a part of Ganpati Visarjan crowds, remembering riot-looted shops, imagining Saroj Pathak or Bhupen Khakar in Bombay Chawls, negotiating leaking taps and Phoren Soap... where is home, where is the outside of that inner space?”
Mehta reflects on how the simultaneity of these spaces has thrown some of the more classical notions of ‘home and public’ or ‘home and world’ in sharper contrast, continually blurring boundaries. Our experiences lead to deeper questioning of the many ideas we operate within – self and being, stranger and citizen, solitude and identity, and so on.
The exhibition supported by the Goethe Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, includes works by visual artists, photographers, as well as performances.
About the Curator
Kaiwan Mehta is a theorist and critic in the fields of visual culture, architecture, and city studies. Mehta has studied Architecture, Literature, Indian Aesthetics and Cultural Studies. In 2017 he completed his doctoral studies at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru, under the aegis of Manipal University. He was recently (in April 2022) appointed as the Dean at Balwant Sheth School of Architecture, at SVKM's NMIMS University. He was recently elected to the coveted International Committee of Architectural Critics (CICA).
He has been elected as the Jury Chairman for two consecutive terms (2015–17 and 2017–2019) for the international artists’ residency programme across 13 disciplines at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Since March 2012 he has been the Managing Editor of Domus India (Spenta Multimedia). From July 2017 to March 2022 he was Professor and Programme Chair of the Doctoral Programme at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad, and was also a founding member of the CEPT Essay Prize. He was the Charles Correa Chair professor at the Goa College of Architecture under the aegis of the Department of Art and Culture, Government of Goa for the academic year 2017-2018.
He authored Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood (Yoda Press. New Delhi, 2009) and The Architecture of I M Kadri (Niyogi. New Delhi, 2016) and has written for various books, artist catalogues, architecture exhibitions, and journals. He has contributed on Modern and Contemporary Architecture in India and South-Asia for the recent and updated edition of Bannister Fletcher's "A History of World Architecture". He curated the mid-career retrospective on the work of architect and urban designer Rahul Mehrotra, and is currently working on other architect biographies - the works of architect and educationist Sen Kapadia, as well as architect and revivalist designer Jitendra Mistry, and the architect and interior designer Ramesh Edwankar. He has curated various exhibitions and delivered lectures across institutions in India and abroad including Centre Pompidou, Paris, Cornell University, Parsons New School, New York, as well as conferences in Portugal, Hungary, China, and Italy.
