The untitled black-and-white photographs in Shahid Datawala's exhibition Shadow Boxing, December 5-13, The Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre compel the viewer to reimagine Bombay as an urban space. The collective Indian imaginary often perceives Bombay as a metropolis teeming with people, crowded trains and cramped houses, the invisible boundaries of the city being stretched and contracted by the momentum of a constant shuttling. Datawala's images, however, reinvent Bombay as an empty, still city. This metamorphosis has nothing to do with whim or fantasy. The elements that make up Datawala's photographs ' crumbling, abandoned houses, dangling wires from yanked-off switchboards, stained walls, leaking pipes, landings laden with filth, each of them juxtaposed with what seems to be its mirror image ' speak of a spectral presence of people, architecture, and ways of life that can be returned to, and perhaps even reclaimed.
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