Concept Note

BOMBAY, BADARPUR BORDER is a suite of installations created for exhibition at the Apeejay Media Gallery, Badarpur Border, New Delhi. The works use a variety of analog and digital media, including live electronics, to circulate a "theme" (Bombay), as well as a physical location (Badarpur), through the gallery space.

The gallery/border is presented by the artists as a site from which to consider the Other city – Bombay. Not the material city alone (which is now anyway called Mumbai), but the more diffuse constructions of data, myth and desire that form its virtual and media identities. The artists deny the customary claims to authenticity that accompany, for example, the Tate’s Century City or NDTV’s Mumbai Live. Only one of us is actually from Mumbai, and we have almost nothing from Mumbai to show. We gather here to invent and perform “Bombay”, to synthesize it in various media: a building as text, an interactive movie generated from images trawled from the net, a virtual user-controlled sea, a piece of film, a live studio... Other actions take place beyond the gallery bounds, stretching across two groups that would perhaps never meet: visitors to the gallery, and those outside, who view the gallery itself as a technocultural object.

The artists' attempt to reconsider traditional notions of site-specific art (and in turn, question ideas of location and mobility) in the context of media arts practice. Here, we are not really mobile – we are just in the "wrong" place. The map is cracked, and we have fallen through. Like GPS gone awry, or a recurring wrong number on your phone. Where is the audience? What kind of Bombay is this? Where on earth is Badarpur? By coming here, we hope to find the many unacknowledged and unexplored ways in which our bodies intersect with places, and imagined places.