‘Parallel Cities’ distils the complexity of urban experience

There are doors, and then there are portals. You swing open a simple glass door to enter the exhibition space at the Italian Cultural Institute of New Delhi, and once inside, a black metal arch beckons out to you. Placed in the centre of the room, it bisects the space into two halves, rather like a portal into another dimension. This portal is a metalwork in artist Ayesha Singh’s Hybrid Drawings (2015 - ongoing) series, combining architectural elements from Delhi’s skyline: a diverse range of Indo-Saracenic, modernist and Mughal buildings, along with Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras. Your gaze travels, its contours, each curve and line bringing new surprises—a temple dome, a Mughal arch. Singh’s work is on view as part of the exhibition, Parallel Cities, curated by the Italian Cultural Institute’s Director, Andrea Anastasio, and anthropologist Franco La Cecla. The exhibition reflects on human experience in the urban landscape, through works by Indian and Italian artists and is on display until March 2, 2024.

Parallel Cities is inspired by the work of Italian author Italo Calvino, particularly his novel Invisible Cities (1972), which is structured as a conversation between the Italian explorer Marco Polo and the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. “Desires are already memories,” Calvino writes, gesturing to slippages between what we imagine and what we remember, the past, present and future linked by the passing of time. His words echo in artist Anup Mathew Thomas’ series Scene from a Wake, which traverses the layered terrain of an entire century through images, text, and an installation. In one image, an overgrown tropical garden ringed by banana trees hints at a curious detail from the history of Kottayam, a city in Kerala. After Pope John Paul’s historic visit to the city in February 1986, 30,000 unsold biryanis were buried at this spot, an accompanying note tells us. The crowds coming to see the Pope mostly carried their own food, leaving local restaurants with prodigious quantities of unsold food. In his works, Thomas identifies unlikely protagonists to populate a history of space and time—a social reformer, a planter, a dentist, a restaurateur, a bishop, and an artist—framing his images through their actions. A mirror flanks a temple idol, reflecting the social reformer’s attempt to reconcile conflicting ideologies, while the dentist’s home clinic lies empty after his death, its chairs now devoid of patients.

For Marco Polo, all the cities he describes to Kublai Khan lead back to Venice. Artist Alice Cattaneo takes us on an abstract and ephemeral journey to Venice with her use of Murano glass, named for the Venetian island where it is made. In Cosmografia blu (2023), she works with watercolours and vibrant flutes of Murano glass. A single line encompasses varying densities, extending from the ebb and flow of blue watercolour across paper into a solid flute of blue glass. In another work, Untitled (2019), a delicate wooden bow strung with cotton yarn frames a solid chunk of Murano glass, the translucence of the cube at odds with its sheer bulk.

The city is always incomplete. It is often under construction, as Stefano Arienti’s choice of material reminds us. He traces intricate urban scenes on white tarpaulin sheets—in one of his drawings, a lone human figure punctuates the geometric precision of the sidewalk, all straight lines, sharp concrete edges, machinery and metal. Arienti often works with found material like magazines, postcards, newspapers and books, manipulating them into new forms with simple, repetitive actions.

The artist Nihaal Faizal coopts one of the world’s oldest trademarks in his series Emergency Vehicle (2022), where he makes colour-pencil drawings of the backs of ambulances in Bangalore that carry the Michelin Man sticker. Made up of a body of stacked tyres, the humanoid figure is the mascot of a French tyre company. Michelin Man runs towards the viewer, its innate sense of action underscored by the words ‘emergency vehicle’ in Faizal’s drawings. His careful staging of the real shines through in minor details, the city’s polluted air settling into the crevices of his ambulance door hinges as traces of black grease.

Architect and artist Martand Khosla incorporates brick dust from clay bricks, a popular building material, into his work. The Continuum (2015) is a perforated roller drum in mild steel, which leaves a stencilled trail of brick dust on the cold concrete floor as it moves. The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, Marco Polo muses in Invisible Cities. In Clouds over Megapolis (2017), Khosla uses brick dust on paper to conjure up a richly textured sky of swirling brown clouds, poised to explode on the unsuspecting city.

Calvino likened Invisible Cities to a polyhedron, its pages strewn with innumerable endings. In a wall of photographs from Dayanita Singh’s House of Love series, one image stands out—a security guard in front of a gleaming sculpture by artist Subodh Gupta. The image is uncannily reminiscent of a plot point in Arundhati Roy’s 2017 novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, where a security guard at an art gallery struggles to do his job because the sharp rays of sunlight bouncing off the steel sculpture make his eyes water. Cities are complex, unpredictable entities. We learn to belong by reading ourselves into their mythologies.

'Parallel Cities' is on view at the Italian Cultural Institute of New Delhi until March 2, 2024.