The cornerstone of this project, where disparate ideas converge, is the site - 303 Pushpa Bhavan, Colaba, Bombay. The apartment the artist lived in for six years before his family emigrated to Australia. He lost something profound when he left India. Even though he can’t articulate what it is, he feels it deeply.  It would be 15 years before he returned to India. And to the apartment which was becoming more significant in his life as time passed. On this occasion and subsequent trips back to India, he looked for answers to unasked questions. Trying to reclaim the thing that was lost.

A Crate Full of Mangoes employs an experimental methodology in exhibition making, as a way to generate meaning and knowledge. Memory, lived experience, and storytelling become central in this process. Utilizing text-based artworks, short stories, objects, ready-mades, video, performance and photography, the exhibition highlights the artist’s ongoing investigations around his mixed-race identity, and entangled sense of place which gives rise to complex ideas of home and belonging.

[...] exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, India’s of the mind. 

Salman Rushdie

Caption

Rhett D'Costa Opening Up the Anglo-Indian Tiffin (Detail) from the exhibition, 'Bruised Food: a living laboratory' RMIT Gallery 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.