DAG at the Mumbai Gallery Weekend

Between 11th ̶ 14th January 2024, Mumbai Gallery Weekend (MGW) returned to the city for the twelfth edition of its four-day-long festival—their biggest yet—with a diverse line-up of thirty-four galleries, off-site exhibitions, pop-ups and public events spread across the city.

What began as an endeavour by nine leading galleries in Mumbai to create a new and inclusive art experience in the city, has today grown to become Mumbai’s largest, free-for-all visual art event, connecting artists, gallerists, collectors, students and art enthusiasts from around the world.

This year, MGW saw the inclusion of new names such as Gallery XXL and Method Juhu, along with older galleries like Chemould Prescott Road, Chatterjee & Lal, Experimenter—Colaba, TARQ and the Taj Art Gallery, who brought a diverse range of modern and contemporary art exhibitions to the much-awaited edition, some even introducing new and upcoming artists.

DAG has actively participated in several editions of the Mumbai Gallery Weekend, using the platform to showcase unique exhibitions that align with MGW’s mission of fostering a deeper engagement with art and art historical narratives among wider audiences. Last year, we turned one of our galleries at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel into a viewing room to display the first-ever commissioned portrait by Raja Ravi Verma, leading to a meaningful dialogue surrounding patronage for the ‘first’ Indian modernist—heralding the modern art movement in India. The sheer enthusiasm and warm response to the exhibition motivated DAG to gear up for this year’s edition with two independent exhibitions curated from its collection of modern and pre-modern art.

The first, on view at DAG 1, was The Orientalists’ Benares, an exhibition specially curated for the weekend that presented views of the ancient city of Benares (Varanasi) by foreign artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An eclectic selection of works by artists ranging from early British landscape painters like Thomas Daniell to Orientalists like the Dutch Marius Bauer, the Belgian-born Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur and the German Erich Kips, the exhibition explored their diverse artistic responses to Benares.

At DAG 2, was the ongoing exhibition Shanti Dave: Neither Earth, Nor Sky, the first retrospective of the modern artist, displaying a diverse set of artworks that chronicles his illustrious career.

We commenced the MGW weekend with a curatorial walkthrough of The Orientalists’ Benares with DAG’s Senior Vice President, Kishore Singh. He gave the visitors a brief introduction to the exhibition and the artists, before taking them through the works, discussing the role that the artists’ renditions played in creating an impression of the city and by extension, of India in Western popular imagination. The context prompted visitors to pause and reflect on the larger historical narrative behind putting such a show together while generally appreciating the works of art.

On the second day, we hosted a stimulating discussion with the cultural theorist and art critic Ranjit Hoskote on The Mystique of Benares Unravelled by Foreign Artists. In conversation with Kishore Singh, Hoskote engaged in a thoughtful dialogue surrounding the lure of Benares and what made the city, with its rich history, a part of most travelling artists’ itineraries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Together, they unpacked how art was used to build colonial narratives, along with how orientalist artists captured the city’s ‘exotic’ views for the West. One of the questions that animated the Q&A session that followed was about consumerism and how many of these commercial artists were producing visuals driven by the idea of what would ‘sell’.

The twelfth edition of MGW came to an end with DAG hosting a curatorial walkthrough for both its exhibitions on Sunday afternoon, as a part of the MGW Walkthroughs with Art and Wonderment—a fun initiative that took people on a three-day gallery-hop, attending walkthroughs in all participating galleries of MGW.