Art on display in the ruins of an abandoned building in Connaught Place

Over the coming few months, the curators say, the idea is to explore showcasing art in a space different from the norm

Standing below the 5-storey building in Connaught Place’s inner circle, you see the windows of the 2nd and 3rd floors boarded up with plastic and cardboard. When you climb up to the first floor, you enter a room where the paint is peeling off the walls exposing both the plumbing and red bricks, and old graffiti covers the rest of it.

The exhibition can be viewed till February 28, from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm, Tuesday to Saturday. Entry is free. (Raj K Raj/HT Photo)

Welcome to the city’s newest pop-up space. For the next 10 days, this space will host an art exhibition featuring works of a number of contemporary south Asian artists..

Over the coming few months, the curators said, the idea is to explore showcasing art in a space different from the norm.

“When you go to a museum or a gallery, that space is really sanitized, so that you can only see the painting and not the environment around it,” Amit Kumar Jain, who has co-curated the show with Reha Sodhi, said.

Sodhi and Jain said they wanted a space where artworks could “speak differently”, so that they could break away from the “white cube” art gallery.

By leaving the venue how they found it, the curators have fulfilled a long-standing wish of displaying art in an environment in which it is not usually consumed, Jain said.

Six years ago, New Delhi’s swish set would visit the first floor, which housed the Oh My God nightclub which shut down six years ago.

The second floor consisted of offices which shut down more than a decade ago, Jain said.

Cracked floors and stained tiles notwithstanding, the space has been used to the fullest extent. Paintings hang on walls, or near-invisible strings, where the structure isn’t strong. A sculpture by Himmat Shah rests on a bar countertop, while a triptych by Shilpa Gupta rests on the ledge jutting out from a wall with broken plaster. Avinash Veeraghavan’s video work Home Sweet Home (2006) occupies a space below the staircase, while Mithu Sen’s Icarus (2007) is projected on the floor in the broken remains of a bathroom.

Some of the works interact with space in interesting ways. Sheba Chhachhi’s The Mermaid’s Mirror (2005) is a series of toy television sets equipped with a pinwheel attached to a reel of stills of erstwhile Bollywood actor Meena Kumari. The TVs each have a hole at the top, allowing air from the fans to enter and spin the pinwheels, which make the reels move.

Sudarshan Setty (whose 2004 work Party is Elsewhere inspired the exhibition’s name and centrepiece), Vivian Sundaram, Subodh Gupta, Atul Dodiya, and a number of other important contemporary artists have been displayed in this exhibition. Strikingly, there are no wall labels or captions near the works, in yet another attempt by the curators to disrupt the way art galleries operate.

All works belong to the Devi Art foundation and two other private collections. Most of the works are only for viewing.

“It took us over a month to make the space public friendly. There was a lot of debris which we had to remove, everyday a different section of a wall would fall off, and when it rained, there was seepage. However, what you see when you go to the exhibition is how we found it,” says Jain.

The exhibition, which began on January 31, took place parallel to the India Art Fair that is held each year at the NSIC Grounds over a period of four days at the start of the month. It offered a sharp contrast to both the fair, as well as other art galleries in the city.

The intended effect was not lost on visitors, many of whom attested to not feeling intimidated in this space as they would normally feel in a gallery.

“The exhibition feels really organic, and just because of the environment, it feels as if I can come here easily, as compared to visiting other exhibitions. The surroundings of the art here make it feel less intimidating, and make me feel that I do not need to have any history about an artist,” says Bhoomika Sharma, a 20-year-old student who visited the exhibition last weekend.

“I have been to many art galleries before, but this is the first time I was thinking a lot about the environment, and curators using space purposefully, something which does not happen in normal art galleries,” said Vikram Kaleka (33).

The exhibition can be viewed till February 28, from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm, Tuesday to Saturday. Entry is free.