In The Second Law, Philippe Calia uses photography, video and text to manifest his own reading of Bombay/Mumbai. The work stems from years of observations of the city’s visual grammar, seemingly aimless strolls in its streets, conversations with the people met along the way, but also encounters with numerous kinds of literature produced around it. In this exhibition, Calia manifests his own observation of the city, as if space was a detour to tap into one’s subconscious, through which one can talk about the self or about the world.
One decisive encounter was of Arun Kolatkar’s alchemy of the ordinary in his Kala Ghoda Poems. The transmutation, through poetry, of debris into “fresh new series of installations” coloured Calia’s perception of the city since then. For the artist, photography is often a means to take notes of found sculptures and other “readymades”. Yet, through spontaneous, playful, sometimes collaborative, interventions in the street, Calia also devises his own ephemeral “installations”, which the camera helps in crystallising.
The series is punctuated by elaborately staged scenes, shot inside historical buildings, as if a photographic negative of the street. Pursuing this whole personification of a city, Calia gives us a peek into Mumbai’s subconscious, proposing to us, to imagine with him what its dreams could look like. With The Second Law, the artist then invites the viewer to (re)trace their journey into one such dream.
Following the tradition of in situ art, the exhibition is conceived in response to the gallery’s space as well as to its location, with a title hinting at a neighbourhood surrounded by courts, dotted with lawyers and other legal paraphernalia. Yet it also alludes to a famous law of physics, inspiring artists for decades now, according to which the distribution of particles in the universe inevitably tends towards disorder. In this way, the show also offers a meditation on life, decay, and the gesture that the creative act plays within it.
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About the Artist
Philippe Calia (b.1985, Paris) is an artist currently based in Bangalore.
His work has received several awards and has been exhibited in various museums, galleries and festivals across Europe and Asia, including Jimei x Arles (China, 2024); Les Rencontres d’Arles (France, 2023); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Germany, 2023); SIPF (Singapore, 2022); and UP Gallery (Taïwan, 2021).
In his practice, Calia primarily uses photography and video to explore the politics of memory. Examining various institutions (the archive, the library, the museum) or technologies (the album, the digital cloud), he sheds light on their discourses, as well as the modes of preservation, perception and commemoration which they attempt to establish.
Experimenting with the form, language and temporality of the photographic medium enables him to pursue this enquiry while questioning an image-making apparatus essentially based on accumulation and extraction. Calia thus aims to ignite some form of critical awareness by working with images of various kinds - between found and constructed, figuration and abstraction, moving and still - rather than seeking a particular photographic style. Nonetheless the form and presentation of these images in space is always crucial, allowing him to explore the situational dimensions of authorship and viewership.
Since 2013, Calia has been collaborating as a photo editor with PIX, a platform for contemporary photography in South Asia. Between 2015 and 2020, he co-directed BIND, a platform for photobooks in India with a public library based in Bombay.
