An organ made out of corrugated metal sheets hangs from one of Clark House's corners. The wooden planks that form the ceiling echo the words of Rupali Patil of a poem she wrote to bring her show together. Watercolors give way to plays of perspective with space. Their perspectives enlarge the space; perspectives that at times are landscapes that enclose, ones we see in distant videos of Gaza.
In January 2014, Raqs Media Collective curated an exhibition that brought together the global contemporary as artists who questioned, put forth concepts and ideas but also inserted themselves into the city's existing infrastructure thus extending the possibilities of those structures into becoming cultural spaces. The exhibition was held at Mati Ghar a circular mud structure, where Rupali Patil extended an opening into a triangular space using corrugated sheets. Corrugated metal sheets designed to replace roofs of homes, became portable cheap and sturdy material to extend cities for migrants into clusters known as slums, shantytowns, favelas. The material is sophisticated and impenetrable, made by the tons, but claustrophobic in the heat. Aluminum mines, steel factories, roads and railway lines displace people from their homes to produce these materials that then house them as they scamper into the city. They purchase the same material that turns into death-capital for them. These are the layers that Rupali Patil narrates in her honeycomb of corrugated sheets that acts as an organ producing tunes of exploitation.
Rupali Patil creates conveyor belts of temptable objects that move away from each other. They resemble the deliverables that are promised to eager voters, deliverables that are often constitutionally guaranteed but never realized. A home, electricity and patches of land synchronize into a ballet of broken promises, promises that can often bring fascists to power with absolute majorities.
A paper cutting mat nests images of young police sentinels sleeping at Bombay's Churchgate station, a paper mat symbolizes the metropolis's bureaucracy that fails to secure with facilities those often blamed at not securing the city. On another paper mat Rupali etches and draws a the skyline of the city's mills, that now turn into gargantuan malls that often alienate with purpose of architecture and the goods they retail to consume. Rupali Patil’s drawings look to the alienation of structures that assert their dominance against policies of urban planning. Usually inhabited by migrants and migrant workers, these structures, like caged homes and dormitories, are often pushed to the peripheries of urban consciousness and enhance the displacement felt by many of these communities. Patil’s drawings, mounted on a cutting board, look at the alienation and the construct of freedom.
A group of papier-mâché boats that are fitted with JCBs, a manager’s coat and cranes sway on the gallery's walls they represent the visuals of inequality from the city of Bombay. As we travel north of Bombay, in the creek that divides the city from the mainland, one often encounters barges that hold cranes to dredge the creek for sand. This sand is used often to construct homes in an ever growing city where its suburbs now cross over to the mainland existing as pockets of densely close buildings between marshes and salt pans near stations on the suburban railway. Bombay is an island made up of 7 islands that were created into one large landmass through reclamation by the British. This reclamation continues and large areas of mangroves disappear each here reducing the catchment area for floodwater leading to flooding disasters during the monsoon. Since the arrival of the Portuguese in the 16th century and until now the indigenous people of Bombay, who are traditionally fisherman – the city and its improvements for infrastructure or greed for land have continuously displaced Kolis. The cranes thus imagine Bombay’s jaws while the boats narrate the history of the ever-disappearing vocation of the Kolis through environmental degradation.
In a large drawing Patil wraps up chimneys, brick walls, pipes and other construction material into boxes that resembles the consumables her show's title 'Everybody drinks but nobody cries' critiques. The anticipation that is cloaked in brown paper bags and the cardboard is often the product of organized corporate intrigue and syndication that often hides exploitation with development. Patil through the layers of all she proposes as art, comments on the nexus of retail advertisements that sell products that claim liberation for women from household chores or easy beauty solutions, a perverse understanding of feminism cloaks a more extreme form of patriarchal exploitation. Rupali Patil (1984) re-arranges visuals that critique political oversight and corruption which create unfortunate happenings such as farmer suicides, exploitation through privatization of water resources, eviction of tribal from their lands, and marginalization of indigenous communities such as the Kolis of Bombay.
- Sumesh Sharma
* The title is related to a city called 'Ouro Preto’ from Minas Gerais, Brazil. There was a restaurant in Ouro Preto. And the menu card of the restaurant told the story of a lady from the 19th century. The story was about her personal life and also about the exploitation of Ouro Preto. There were many mines during the early 19th and 20th centuries. I like the way she observed her surrounding and describe the story of exploitation Ouro Preto. - RP
