A Man of the Crowd

Text by KAIWAN MEHTA

SAMEER KULAVOOR

A Man of the Crowd

Text by KAIWAN MEHTA

A Man of the Crowd SAMEER KULAVOOR

Produced by

F35/36 Dhanraj Mahal,

CSM Marg, Apollo Bunder, Colaba, Mumbai 400001. www.tarq.in

Text by KAIWAN MEHTA

INTRODUCTION We are delighted to present A Man of the Crowd - Sameer Kulavoor’s first solo exhibition at TARQ. The show, which gets

its title from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, consists of a body

of work that underscores the artist’s broad practice that brings

together art and design. Kulavoor’s unique observations of urban spaces – a landscape he is intimately familiar with – and his depictions of the diverse characters that inhabit these spaces, define the visual vocabulary of this show.

For this body of work, created over the span of a year, Kulavoor took a step further away from his regular practice as a graphic artist and illustrator, choosing instead, to embrace paint on canvas.

He also created a series of terracotta figurines that serve as three dimensional extensions of the paintings. While the contemporary

work of Sudhir Patwardhan and the more traditional compositional

strategies of Mughal miniatures served as reference points, this series is a definitive testament to Kulavoor’s sensitive observation

of the idiosyncrasies of a metropolis and the myriad characters that inhabit it.

The flat, graphic, gray, surfaces of Kulavoor’s canvases come alive

with faceless human figures, rendered in contrasting, eye-popping florescent hues. These characters appear to be ubiquitous yet carry

contemporary archetypes, from the genial “aunty” to the urban A Man of the Crowd

hipster, underscore Kulavoor’s fondness for and celebration of

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cities and their multi-layered identities.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue essay penned by researcher, academic and architect Dr. Kaiwan Mehta.

Hena Kapadia Gallery Director, TARQ

sameer kulavoor INTRODUCTION

fascinating personal narratives. These delightful compositions of

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Sameer Kulavoor paints the anatomy of a street. The street here in these images is a collection of people and activities and nothing more – there is no architecture, there is no urban geography, no pavements, no kerb, no steps or doors of buildings or shops, absolutely nothing. And yet there is the intricate world of inside and outside, the urban and the interior, the shop and the home, the office and the construction site all there – all out there on the street. And yet none of them are there to stay – they are all on the move – a sense of perpetual ‘on the go’ which keeps

A man, and a woman, a plastic bag, a shattered lotus, and more… in the crowd

the frames of all the works seem like a slice or an extract from a seamless spread of reality; and literally make the frame side’s feel like they are ‘on the edge’.

Kulavoor’s world has been a collection of many graphic ideas and memories – from his work and job at MTV studios to making books, sketching streets and making posters. There is now in his present work a sudden surge of memories that seem to be emerging in the form of near real-life miniature drawings and painted images – of people, objects as handled by people, and the activities that people are always consciously or otherwise

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perpetual action – functional action of going somewhere, reaching a destination, doing something, selling things, sweeping, something of necessary purpose and the sense of a destination - at the same time they are all also as if existing in an unreal world – where no

sameer kulavoor essay

involved in or performing. Every walker is in between the self of

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one is conscious of all the others in that crowd, yet negotiating a

The crowd becomes familiar – but continues to be the crowd.

crowd. This sense of being in the crowd and yet being absorbed in one’s own self world is the perpetual state of being in most of

Our hyper-connected lives are always floating in crowds and

these works by Kulavoor.

swarms of people – family and friends, neighbours and hawkers,

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The street, crowd, and world in Kulavoor’s images is a never-

news channels – it is a world of hyper-people. The crowd of

ending experience; it extends in all directions of space equally and

strangers has been an important mode through which the modern

has a sense of being continuous in time as well, until disturbed

and modern-urban world has been understood. Our lives are

otherwise. The activities are from all kinds of time comingled

surrounded by strangers – a crowd of strangers, amongst who

in this expanse of crowd and street – activities of the morning

we live and work, and we even recognize them occasionally, or

and the night, activities of relaxation and rush, of hard work and

identify with them at times, in particular contexts – but the self

strolling – someone is relaxing on that hard paved road as if sitting

and the stranger continue within a relationship always that persists

in the garden, while a police-man-like figure is gesturing order and

between stranger-liness and levels of familiarity. How do we see

direction with his stick or baton to an empty space where traffic

ourselves then in this constant state of rush and rest? How do we

or a rush of people may have just passed by or will enter soon,

recognize our world and what we do inside here while we stand

and someone is doing Yoga very diligently while others are trying

amongst strangers who are possibly in the same state of question

to reach somewhere, or maybe run away from somethings and

and action? The strangers in the crowds of Kulavoor streets are

someone. What time of the day is in these frames? It is chaotic

characters – like out of a fiction or film, a book or a joke – they are

here in these edgy frames of Kulavoor – but everybody inside it

somewhere recognizable, but also escaping my gaping eyes, and

seems most at peace with themselves, and there is a sense of calm

my staring mind. I want to look at people and make conversation

you experience as you sit across every frame and watch it, look

with my eyes – ask them if they had breakfast today, what did

at it with patience, checking out a figure here and another there,

they eat, did they fight with their wives, is her boyfriend an ass,

and the next one nearby, and then the other one across there,

are you stressed about work today – all the same just like I am

and you keep meeting one man after another, one person after

thinking about questions this morning, all just like I am thinking

another, one woman, one character after another on the street.

this sultry evening?!! I want to make the crowd of strangers my

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A Man of the Crowd

in the local bus and in the mall, the newspapers and television

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Series 1 - C Acrylic on Canvas 48 x 48 inches 2017

own, follow the man like Edgar Allan Poe did his man of the crowd, in the short story he wrote with that title “A Man of the Crowd”.

But Kulavoor can actually follow every single man, and woman, and plastic bag, and shoe, and grille, and plasma television, in the crowd – he wants to follow everyone’s story and with him he helps the crowds and strangers in his audiences, his viewers emerging from crowds, also follow them – those characters in his frames, all of them. As the viewer, you emerge from the crowd on the street into the studio or the gallery and follow again the crowd you left outside – did they all follow you and get stuck or painted in those edgeless frames? And if you entered Kulavoor’s A Man of the Crowd 08

of collected objects, painstakingly collected pieces of shapes, material, memory, curios, notes, cups, bottles, a whole crowd things that make our interior worlds. On the street it is crowds of people, and inside our private spaces it is crowds of things.

sameer kulavoor essay

studio or my house you would enter another crowd – a crowd

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Kulavoor paints and brings inside our occupied world crowds of

There is a robot in the crowd, Nemo too, someone beating up

people and collection of things. There is then that strain between

someone, while the guy next to them is busy in selfie-mode,

purposefulness and purposelessness. While some one is looking

while somewhere else someone is lighting a cigarette, protesting

busy going somewhere, or cleaning a mess on the street, or

(apparently alone) against something (if at all anyone is listening

controlling traffic, or carrying goods – there are those that are

to him), playing the guitar next to a smashed lotus flower, making

lazing in the midst of a busy road as if lounging in the shade of a

an announcement to an invisible crowd of listeners or passersby,

leafy park, or strolling aimlessly, loitering for the sake of walking

a crumpled rule page out of a school note book, and blue-white

– are these people mad? Carrying a block of concrete on one’s

slipper… There are many things here and everywhere that belong

head and walking – to where? For what? A chair, a cricket bat,

to many locations – street, railway station, office department,

or three bricks – these are just left on the street – who did that?

home, playground, living room, classroom maybe too. The inside

Is everyone useful and charged by the necessity of some action

spaces and rooms are somehow here on the streets, without walls,

or work? Or are there some just fooling around and teasing the

just containing the objects and activities they hold. The images

world – are there madmen and jesters also, teasing the world in

are evident of some space that is the road and the street and in

their own tongue-and-cheek way, asking rude questions to people

an open to sky and light area, yet in many ways that is only an

who think they are purposeful in a world of aimless strangers?

assumption. Often the spaces and objects between the characters

Are there madmen anymore anyways on the streets? Or have

here, or the mannerism of the character is that of a private and

we sanitized the world so much that there is no more ambiguity,

personal location – either a private moment carved out while in

no more doubt, no more jest, no more song and dance that asks

public, or having lost sense of being in public, or actually being

questions about life and being, work and mind to the crowd on

inside somewhere but all the walls have vanished and everyone

the street? Madness, chaos, and peace somehow hope to exist

if exposed to everyone, only thing is, they do not realise that.

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to be one in that crowd, allow the stranger and the madman to

The classical binary of the inside and the outside, the sane and

challenge your being and willful self, to be able to recognize the

the insane, the purposeful and the loitering, the self and the other,

tussle between madness and peace.

all come into question as you move from one frame to another

sameer kulavoor essay

side-by-side within Kulavoor’s images; but it takes the viewer

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making friendships, or at least hoping and trying to make friends

endless crowd of strangers and madmen, one endless script of

with each of the characters in the frames. The bedroom grille, the

ever-expanding streets and roads – smooth and not dug-up, clean,

painting for the living room, the witness box of the courtroom,

nearly ephemeral rather than rude, dusty, and real. Kulavoor’s

are all exposed on the wide-open street, suddenly belonging to

painted miniatures are like magic mirrors showing you split-and-

everybody, and open to everyone’s imagination. In the paintings

collected environments of people and things – a kaleidoscope of

of many artists such as Sudhir Patwardhan or Gieve Patel, or

disentangled crowds and future memories.

Atul Dodiya, or the work of graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee, a geography of objects and material things build up a narrative of this struggle between the self and the other, the insider and the

Kaiwan Mehta

Mumbai, March 2018

external world, the person herself and the crowd; in the work of Kulavoor the narrative is outside the frame, it has escaped and he as an artist has not wanted it within the frame. These narratives are what the viewer collects, catches, grabs, just as they keep falling off the edge or slip out – because the viewer is the stranger in the crowd of these frames, and s/he wants to be there in the crowd, not alone – or maybe sometime be in the crowd not as a stranger, not as a madman, but as a lonesome wanderer.

The viewer and the artist hold these crowds in their narrative realities and imagined collectives. In describing the crowd through A Man of the Crowd 12

world of grilles and selfies, there is a deciphering of the realities we comingle with in our daily lives. There no longer is a separation of the self and the other, the personal and the stranger, the space and the crowd, the location of inside and outside, and all is but one

sameer kulavoor essay

characters, and through their objects of belonging, their material

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A Man of the Crowd 14

Series 2 - B Acrylic on Canvas 30 x 20 inches 2017

A Man of the Crowd

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Series 1-B Acrylic on Canvas 48 x 48 inches 2017

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A Man of the Crowd

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Series 1 - A Acrylic on Canvas 48 x 48 inches 2017

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A Man of the Crowd

Series 5 - E Acrylic on Canvas 10 x 10 X 1 inches 2017

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Series 5 - G Acrylic on Canvas 10 x 10 X 1 inches 2017

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Series 4 - C Acrylic on Canvas 12 x 12 inches 2017

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Series 4 - E Acrylic on Canvas 12 x 12 inches 2017

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Series 6 Acrylic on Canvas 6 x 6 inches (each) Total size 18 x 12 inches 2017

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Series 6 Acrylic on Canvas 6 x 6 inches (each) Total size 18 x 12 inches 2017

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A Man of the Crowd 24

Series 3 Acrylic on Canvas, Part of a set of 6 15 x 15 inches (each), 15 x 90 inches 2017

A Man of the Crowd

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Series 7 - I Acrylic on Canvas 4 x 4 inches 2017

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A Man of the Crowd

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Series 8 - E Acrylic, terracotta sculptures and concrete 5.6 X 5.6 X 1 inches 2018

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A Man of the Crowd

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Series 8 - E Acrylic, terracotta sculptures and concrete 5.6 X 5.6 X 1 inches 2018

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ABOUT THE ARTIST Sameer Kulavoor’s (b.1983) practice lies at the intersection of graphic design, illustration and art. He has been creating a personal body of work, and self-publishing art books and zines that take a look at characteristic mannerisms and archetypal facets of urban surroundings, design and culture. Some of the zines he has produced include Sidewalks & Coffeeshops ( 2009), Zeroxwallah Zine (2011),

The Ghoda Cycle Project (poster-book, 2012), Blued (book/zine , 2013) and Oh Flip (flipbook, 2013).

Kulavoor’s works were most recently exhibited in a show titled Please

Have A Seat at Artisan’s gallery in Mumbai (2016). He exhibited The Ghoda Cycle Project at WDC Helsinki in 2012 and in Mumbai in 2013 while also collaborating with Paul Smith on a series of Ghoda Cycle Tee-shirt designs that were released worldwide. Most recently, he has been working on a number of large scale public art projects and paintings which are on view in Auckland (New Zealand), Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai. A Man of the Crowd is Kulavoor’s first solo

A Man of the Crowd

Kulavoor is the founder of Bombay Duck Designs and co-founder and

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co-curator of 100%ZINE – a visual arts magazine that discovers and showcases a wide range of visual art talent from India and abroad.

Series 8 - H Acrylic, terracotta sculptures and concrete 5.6 X 5.6 X 1 inches 2018

He currently lives and works in Mumbai.

sameer kulavoor ABOUT THE ARTIST

exhibition at TARQ.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Kaiwan Mehta is an architect, academic, and researcher, living and working in Mumbai. He is the Managing Editor of Domus India (Spenta Multimedia); Jury Chairman of Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany); and author of Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating

a Mumbai Neighbourhood (Yoda Press, New Delhi: 2009), and The Architecture of I M Kadri (Niyogi Books, New Delhi: 2016).

In 2017, the Manipal University awarded him a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree for his doctoral research thesis exploring the subjectarea of ‘architectural ornament and the metropolitan culture’ with a special emphasis on the late-19th century as well as very recent histories of Bombay/Mumbai. He is currently Guest Faculty

A Man of the Crowd

at CEPT (Ahmedabad).

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info@tarq.in | www.tarq.in