Grand Hyatt Mumbai 2 Artwork 1

    The hotel was full of expensive artwork. There was so much that I had to devote two pages to it.

 

"Bollywood: City of Dreams," by Riyas Komu.
Komu's composition in collaboration with the Kerala wood-carver Raju is a delightfully profane, not-quite mirror image to the sacred domain of the rock-cut temple and the cave hermitage, around the theme of Bollywood: Mumbai's vast film industry. Bollywood embodies the image of a metropolis where dreams are fulfilled and magic is the dominant reality. Raju has carved in mahogany the 12-foot-long image of a reclining actress Woman as Bollywood's most addictive image; the dismembered hand and leg emerge from beyond the screen, as though trying to make contact with an imagined body. Indicating the more sordid aspect of fantasy met with frustration in the city, Komu also connects black flues, emblematic of industry, emanating from the dream-body. Komu also presents the "first day, first show" patrons who throng the cinema halls in India's small towns, repeating their images in a sequence.

"Cave Sentinels," by Rajeev Sethi
Conceived as collapsible lamps in the workshops of the art connoisseur Anand Sarabhai, these light pillars, crafted from handmade paper by a group of artists from Indore and illuminated from within, bring to mind the looming rock-hewn profiles of the massive yet lyrical cushion-capital columns favored by the Kalachuri dynastic patrons of Gharapuri, as the Elephanta Island sanctuary was known in the 6th century A.D. These columns, two translucent and two opaque, capture the eternal in ephemeral gestures. Although expressive in a contemporary sense, they return us to a time nearly two millennia ago when today's Mumbai region was a nodal point for the Indian Ocean trade that connected West Asia to peninsular India and Southeast Asia.

 

This style of artwork was on display near the front door.

 

 

 

Moonphase, by Jyoti Kolte
The universal generative principles of Shiva and Shakti, male and female, appear as the complementary phenomena of darkness and light in Jyoti Kolti's installation. Shaped from metal and treated with resin, the two discs held in communion are colored a deep nocturnal blue and perforated to allow pinpoints of light to show through from the incandescent bulb behind each disc. The impression that the viewer carries away is that of stellar illuminations punctuating the night sky. The viewing eye is transported into an exploration of various forms of counterpoint in the subtle composition of forces, each modeled on the complementarity between the lingam and the yoni, which manifest themselves as light-shaft and disc-base, and as demarcated form and diffuse halo of light. When lit from within and above, the discs cast shadows resembling a figure 8, the ancient symbol of infinity.

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Back to India December 2005