Important Notice

Living and working in the megalopolis of Mumbai, Justin Ponmany’s images are borne from the many contradictions and crossings of the city, including those between the personal and the public, the individual and the industrial, stagnation and regeneration. The present lot, informed by these urban oppositions, exposes the underbelly of progress and development and the ways in which it is glossed over and ignored. The title of the work, ‘Key to... Living and working in the megalopolis of Mumbai, Justin Ponmany’s images are borne from the many contradictions and crossings of the city, including those between the personal and the public, the individual and the industrial, stagnation and regeneration. The present lot, informed by these urban oppositions, exposes the underbelly of progress and development and the ways in which it is glossed over and ignored. The title of the work, ‘Key to Ruin’, suggests perhaps that some of the ‘opened doors’ that proponents of development sing the praises of, may actually lead in the opposite direction.

Combining raw visuals and fragments of text with slick, phosphorescent holograms, the artist’s surfaces, like his subjects, relate the paradox that is postmodernity. Ponmany’s process is as unusual as his images, incorporating unconventional materials ranging from plastic-like industrial epoxy to high-gloss hologram foil. Reflecting on the artist’s practice, Ranjit Hoskote explains that “In fashioning himself as a citizen and artist in a demanding, even inflammable metropolitan context, [Ponmany] seeks out implements that a robustly industrial-grade or pungently artisanal. His relatively unorthodox materials include resin, epoxy, hologram foil and printing ink; the photographs that he takes of people and sites as he walks or drives around Bombay serve him as working drawings. His aesthetic combines the grittiness of everyday technologies of communication and protocols of iteration with the lyricism of a meditation on self, place, time, decay and survival” (“A Compass with Ten Directions”, The Artist Lives and Works in Baroda / Bombay / Calcutta / Mysore / Rotterdam / Trivandrum, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinrucke exhibition catalogue, 2005, unpaginated).

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