Amol K Patil’s white plasterboard architectural structures, referring to vernacular architecture in Mumbai, sit uneasily in the vast, postindustrial main hall of Röda Sten Konsthall. A raised floor with a roof the size of a small room abuts a low and irregularly shaped platform, each supporting an array of sculptures. They are intended as homage to the chawl, a distinctive form that evolved from housing for mill workers under British colonial rule in the late nineteenth century.
Initially designed for single occupancy with common spaces and courtyards, the chawls soon exceeded their intended function as isolated residences within the mill compound. Workers arriving in the city with families modified them, so that social structures from Rajasthan, Gujarat, the Konkan coast, and elsewhere became entangled with those of Mumbai. Though they had few amenities, the chawls provided a social safety net that Prasad Shetty, co-founder and professor at School of Environment and Architecture in Mumbai, describes as “an architecture of care.” This sociality is absent from Patil’s clean silhouetted representation. I am struck by the discord between what is referenced and what is given to be experienced.
Instead, the affective impact of the work is of diffuse, nostalgic mourning. An audio cassette emerges halfway from a mass of unpolished bronze in a sculpture the size of a small bundle. Hands and feet are scattered across the walls, also cast in bronze, tethered to long metal rods shaped to evoke the rest of the body. Pen-and-ink drawings of torsos, arms, a belt are framed by shapes reminiscent of territorial borders. A prone corporeal shape is covered by a large mass, perhaps a blanket or a pile of earth. Poetry is projected onto it from above as a subtitle line of white script against the muddy color of the unfinished metal.
