ABSTRACT
On February 25, 2012, far from the institutional ambits of the contemporary art world, an extraordinary art installation opened in a hall in the Shree Ganesh Vidya Mandir High School in Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai that is now home to more than a million people who subsist at the margins of public civic services. Positioned towards the end of a narrow meandering lane off 90 Feet Road, a road pragmatically named after its alleged width, this was an atypical location for an art installation. The hall itself had been painted a luminous monastral turquoise, an equally peculiar choice for a space meant for the display of art. In Dharavi, however, this very color served to render the space familiar to its local viewers and participants who associated the color to the interiors of the many makeshift homes that jostle against each other in the slum’s narrow alleys.1 Mimicking domestic interiors, objects displayed in the hall – steel vessels, a gas stove, cupboards, a television, and recycled roller-shutters that often serve as entrances to many makeshift one-room homes in Dharavi – invoked the domestic in deliberately explicit terms (Figure 4.1). This resonated well with the installation’s title, Ghari/Ghar Pe/At Home. Organized by the Society for Nutrition Education and Health Action, a Mumbai-based non-profit focusing on women’s health in the city’s numerous low-income urban sprawls, and sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, a London-based institution for research in public health, the exhibition marked the culmination of a yearlong dialog on art and health involving nineteen participants from the communities of Dharavi and Santa Cruz, Mumbai, and three international artists.
