It’s a warm afternoon in Mumbai; the city’s mercury levels are setting new benchmarks every day. But even as Mumbai sweats, a certain room in the city’s Shakti Mills neighbourhood appears to be immune, both to the heat and the cosmopolitanism brewing outside its perimeters. The ‘Black Box’ — the first of its kind in India — (the room’s aesthetic mimics its moniker) is an architecturally striking oasis of cool.

But if the room could speak, it would argue that, ever so often, it’s flooded with warmth in the form of conversations that are born here. You see, the Black Box nestled in G5A — the city’s very own album of contemporary art, is a multi-functional space that plays host to screenings, performances and plays.

Mumbai-based architect and filmmaker Anuradha Parikh charts the course of transforming a once humble warehouse in Mumbai’s Shakti Mills into its current identity as a ‘home for experimental and independent arts’. At the end of the process, the space wasn’t the only thing that had metamorphosed. Parikh had, too.

Today, G5A stands against the cityline as a pièce de résistance for the contemporary arts, daring urbanity to challenge its ideals. Through its repertoire of screenings, conversations and theatre festivals, it is furthering the legacy of the artistic movement that enveloped Mumbai in a tight embrace from the 1960s through the 1980s. To Parikh, the Black Box is a metaphor for potential, for infinite possibility. “In a black void, you don’t see any specific form, you don’t see boundaries.”

She recalls the conundrum of finding a middle ground between wanting to redesign completely and wanting to preserve the antiquity of the warehouse. Finally, her design philosophy leaned towards the latter. But the premise was always inclusion. “I did not want this to become just a venue, but instead, a space that would be accessible for local communities. Our tagline ‘culture, community, and city’ gives an essence of what G5A was meant to be,” she shares.

Where art and community convene

Reserved for VIPs

The words are sometimes plastered on the front-row seats at programmes at G5A. Guests filing in leave the seats vacant, which soon seat their lawful occupants — the millworkers, the Kolis, members of the Worli Koliwada sea-faring community, and others in the neighbourhood.

At these programmes, they are the “missing VIPs”, Parikh points out. This thought aligns with her intent of making the local communities important stakeholders of the G5A mission. “Art enables us to think differently, shifts something in us,” she emphasises. “It empowers us to redefine how we live our lives, how we vote (from Leonard Bernstein’s quote that is mounted on one of their walls), and gives us a kit for life.”

Parikh’s familiarity with contemporary art disciplines borrows from........

© The Better India