There’s plenty of room for everyone in here

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Aradhana Seth’s work is assembled into different rooms each telling a story of their own; The Living Room;

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”

— Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

Last week, Mumbai saw two exhibitions tackle the ideas of “home” and “belonging” in very different ways. Places of Rebirth by Navin Rawanchaikul looked at the journeys we undertake in our lives, and the places where we set down new roots to begin life afresh. It posited a borderless, non-geographical land, that all who wander can call home. Looking at home in an even more “formless”, abstract way (yet expressed through the rather concrete depiction of familiar objects), was Aradhana Seth’s Everyone Carries a Room About Inside. Aradhana’s conceptualisation of home is the one we carry within us — filled with memories or an imagining of spaces and motifs — one we never let go of.
On entering the gallery, you have the feeling of entering someone’s private space, and yet, there are things you recognise — some evoking nostalgia, others, wistfulness. A pink dresser with a three-way mirror invites you to sit down on its painted stool, stare at your reflection. Another exhibit depicts a functional bathtub against a chequered floor and pastel yellow walls. The walls and the floor extend beyond the borders of the painting, giving you an illusion of depth. Of course, that is a technique that Aradhana is familiar with, having worked as a set designer for over a decade on Indian and international films. There’s a synergy between the gallery and the exhibits that’s striking.
“I wanted to depict the outside, in, and the inside, out,” Aradhana explains. “To expand the home beyond its walls and keep it within the walls. To always create an idea: Whether it’s a lubricant for our thoughts or a story of fiction or non-fiction.” Within the exhibition itself, there are “spaces within spaces”: For instance, a section of the gallery has the appearance of a living room, with the exhibits that relate to what you might find in one. Other exhibits mirror more intimate spaces, like a bedroom or a bathroom. The arrangement is intentional, the artist says, adding, “The formal spaces like the living and dinning room look more formal and the private spaces like the bedroom, bathroom and closet look casual — they’re meant to. I hoped that the spaces made with the few ‘true walls’ (at the exhibition) would engage the viewer, and introduce him to his own self, like an introspection or a catalyst to recall.”
The paintings for “Everyone Carries a Room About Inside” have a very educational picture-book feel, the kind we learnt from back in the early ‘90s. And while a few have a three-dimensional element (one painting of tape recorder with a rainbow motif sees a real tape recorder — painted to resemble its canvas twin — set on the floor a few inches away from the painting: The impression is oddly surreal; a real object springing to life from a painted one), most are two-dimensional. Then there are also a few photographs: An abandoned, rumpled bed, an unused set of dishes.
The works seem seamless (in terms of style and theme), but they’ve been undertaken at different points in time. “There is a back-story to each object,” Aradhana reveals. “Some were made four years ago, and some were made a few months ago. The photographs were taken over a period of eight years…Someone asked my friend Nandini at the opening, ‘When did she start making this work?’ My friend answered, ‘She’s been doing it all her life’. I think that’s the perfect answer.”
Aradhana’s work has many layers, and it would take many visits to uncover them all. But perhaps that’s only to be expected considering that Aradhana’s inner “room” has changed so many times. “But there have been some constants: A space to think and just be still and quiet, photographs and diaries, a study table...” Aradhana says. The beauty of Everyone Carries a Room About Inside is that it is as much about the viewers’ “rooms” as it is about the artist’s. Aradhana says, “The exhibition consists of so many rooms: Mine, Friends’, Strangers’, Imagined, Solitary Woman, Hermit, Film Maker, Rural, Urban.”
With so many rooms on display, perhaps the viewer would find the one that he carries about inside.

Aradhana Seth’s “Everyone Carries a Room About Inside” is on display at the Chemould Prescott Art Gallery, Mumbai, until December 8