Faded blue plaster. A mandap situated on a parapet. Festoons above the door. For a generation of Mumbaikars who grew up in chawls, these images carry memories of walking in and out of open doors. “I grew up in Dadar and Parel. I have seen the chawls, and the mills change over the years. The landscape has slowly been redrawn,” shares Amol K Patil. The artist’s latest solo, A Forest of Remembrance, opens today at Project 88 in Colaba.
The exhibition is part of Patil’s larger project of the same title exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and curated by Victoria Sung, Margot Norton, and Tausif Noor in January. “The work is a reaction to the slow erasure of the BDD Chawls from the city’s landscape,” the artist reveals. The chawls were a part of Patil’s memory of the Bombay of his childhood.
