Art for the public

Place: MUMBAI 

The facade with the cobweb, made up of thousands of stamp pads

A cobweb is not something you usually stop and look at. For this one however, you will. It’s a cobweb that covers the entire front façade of the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, the city’s public museum. It is made of 30,000 rubber stamps strung together. Look closely and you discover names of Mumbai roads and places now known by their new names. Arthur Road, Churchgate, Flora Fountain, Victoria Terminus, Kings Circle, and many more. 

The work has been created for ZegnArt Public, a project started by Italian luxury fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna, and its first stop is India. There are three sections to ZegnArt - Public Art, Special Projects and Art in Global Stores. The first country chosen for Public Art section of the ZegnArt project was announced last year as India and the selected institution - the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai. The Public section will move next to Turkey and then Brazil. 

Anna Zegna, Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, Gildo Zegna and Reema Kallat
at the launch of the work at the museum

Two members of the Zegna family, CEO Gildo Zegna and Anna Zegna, Image Director, were on hand recently to launch the first of the various country initiatives that the brand will undertake in the near future. “This project is about growth in the sense of culture,” said Gildo Zegna, saying it started with the thought that where is no culture, there is no growth. “We see that our customer is more and more interested in culture related to design, art and fashion,” he said. “We want to improve relationships between our countries. What we have started here is important to us. We are aware that contemporary culture nourishes our business every day, whether directly or indirectly. ZegnArt is our active contribution to it, a mark of our presence within it, and our dialogue with it.” 

The work, Cobweb/Crossings, is by Reena Kallat, who was selected from a list of 20 long listed artists under the age of 50 who had a considerable body of work. Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, Director of the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, formerly the Victoria and Albert Museum, elaborated on the painstaking process to select the artist by a panel of curators. Including Kallat, seven artists were shortlisted - A Balasubramaniam, Atul Bhalla, Gigi Scaria, Hema Upadhyay, Sakshi Gupta and Srinivasa Prasad. “We had to think about the artwork, how it would create the dialogue for the reasons of this artwork. The intention was to push the envelope, lead people to think about the art work, what was it and why,” she explained. 

Indophile Anna Zegna, passionate about the project, stressed on the space of public art. “In Italy, there is a lot of public art, while in India, the public space is very different,” she said. “Art is not a luxury. Our family has always recognized quality, value and innovation, and it works for our brand too. The quality of artists in India is very good, and it needs to be supported more,” she stressed. 

A close up of the cobweb, at once spectacular and thought provoking

There are 55 roads that Kallat identified for this project - Cobweb/Crossings, all roads whose colonial names were changed to make them sound indigenous. Kallat says she wanted to explore the idea of how names change a city’s memory and imagination and whether renaming changes how a space is seen. “A cobweb is evocative of time and just as a room is left vacant; stories that are not visited gather cobwebs that appear to hold the dust from the past,” Kallat said. The rubber stamp has been part of Kallat’s art in the part, who is intrigued by its shape as well as its associations – bureaucratic red tape bureaucratic and almost thoughtless approvals. The work incorporates these, ensuring the masses engage with art in public spaces.

Putting together the work was quite a challenge, and the project will remain for the next three months. Mehta said the project is also expected to travel. “We are also planning an interactivity around it – there is a sense that this will also be the start of a process of archiving the city,” she said. Given that it is next to the much visited city zoo, and in a central location, the massive work is expected to make at least some take a pause and think.