Time, Politics, and Housing

A recent exhibition on housing in India uses discourse as a tool to addresses the concepts of living and dwelling in a constantly evolving urban-rural continuum

- Shreyank Khemlapure

 

State of Housing, an exhibition by the curatorial team of Rahul Mehrotra, Kaiwan Mehta and Ranjit Hoskote, is a sequel to State of Architecture from 2016. Like the previous exhibition, what is is remarkable, among other things, is that it is for the first time that an exhibition is discussing the question of housing and its architecture on a national scale. For that reason alone, it becomes an important marker where a certain form of stock-taking of the state of housing is undertaken for a massive and diverse nation as India.

I am choosing not to discuss the design of the exhibition, the film by the curatorial team, or the series of films obtained from the Films Division of India. However, to mention briefly, the film made by the curatorial team is one of the most crucial and engaging parts of the exhibition. It clearly discusses the state of the marginalised and displaced communities through their own voices and through the voices of the intellectuals and professionals operating in those realms. What I would like to focus is on some of the implicit ideas in the exhibition and offer my reading of the same, albeit very very briefly:

1. Time, space and affordability At its very essence, the exhibition is about time and space; of course, everything in this world can be looked at as a matter of time and space. However, especially because it is an exhibition on housing, the question of time and space are of utmost importance.