Meera Devidayal

“A Terrible Beauty,” Meera Devidayal’s first solo exhibition in five years, addresses the afterlives of Mumbai’s defunct textile mills. Though Devidayal relies on the aesthetic and nostalgic allure of ruins in her documentary photographs of the crumbling buildings, she also reimagines their existence through painterly interventions. For instance, the canvases Rose Garden and A Terrible Beauty (all works cited, 2011) offer dreamlike landscapes superimposed over expansive views of massive, roofless factories. Here, wild foliage in the photographs and painted rows of blooming roses and tulips triumph over a dilapidated emblem of Mumbai’s industrial modernity. While Devidayal’s fantastical visions of rejuvenation may seem trite and kitschy—they mimic popular posters and locations of Bollywood music videos—they deeply resonate in this city as it faces an acute shortage of open spaces.

In much of the rest of the exhibition, Devidayal abandons hypothetical propositions. The video Staircase to Nowhere juxtaposes a flight of steps with an escalator, referring to the conversion of one of the city’s iconic mills into a mall. Meanwhile, A Leveled Playing Field uses animation to show grand glass-and-steel towers emerging from a concrete skeleton that was once occupied by the working class. This impending future is already a palpable present for other mills. Yet the site pictured in the film still lies vacant, waiting its turn. The structure’s clandestine use as a cricket court affords Devidayal an opportunity for a fantastical insertion: Players of the national team appear as spectators of a match at the mill through digital fabrication. Fictional interludes such as this one imbue the sites of the defunct mills with renewed potential, even if they remain in the realm of impossibility.