Gallery As Laboratory

Roshan Shahani checks out Vanita Gupta’s experiments with objects and their environments.

In An Act In Three Scenes at Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, from the 26th of April to the 30th of May, Vanita Gupta assembled sculptural pieces, drawings, installations and multimedia objects, pulled out from her cabinet of bric-a-brac and miscellany of junk.

Gupta’s laboratory is her studio. The hand-engineered objects created out of a range of materials are constructions with open and solid shapes, displaying an adventurism that explores the tenets of form and formlessness. This feisty play is the perpetual preoccupation of artists who affirm, over and over again that ‘what matters about an object is its matter’. The ensemble at the show was curatorially presented with texts and technical apparatuses by the architect and designer Naveen Mahantesh.

A flat studio light marked and mapped the space around a sculptural work – Gupta seemed to test its spatial contours. Inducing her latest fabrications to masquerade as figurative entities, call them spectral contraptions if you will, her determination to stretch, push and maneouvre forms in this exhibition was an attempt to explore the scenography of phenomena.