On the ground

Such a near-hallucinatory approach to reality may be found among Milan's young photographers as well, although, as if in deference to stereotypes about Milan itself, their work is often coolly detached. Paola Pivi, for example, submits life to sudden manipulations, turning reality into a stage set for a surreal television commercial with her images of zebras on snowy mountains and donkeys at sea--or of crocodiles playing with whipped cream, on view this year at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin's Miami space. And Luisa Lambri explores monuments of modernist architecture: Her 2006 solo shows at Luhring Augustine in New York and Studio Guenzani in Milan focused on buildings designed by Walter Gropius, Luis Barragan, and Marcel Breuer. In her photographs these solid structures, portrayed through marginal details or lateral views, become mirages hovering in the desert--traces of a past whose dreams for the future never became a reality. A perfect mirror, perhaps, for the plastic dreams with which Milan is so obsessed, and for Milan, the invisible city.

MASSIMILIANO GIONI IS A CURATOR AT THE NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, NEW YORK, AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE FONDAZIONE NICOLA TRUSSARDI, MILAN.

MASSIMILIANO GIONI

Mumbai

AT THE KABUTARKHANA intersection, a major traffic nexus in Mumbai, thousands of lights sparkle on buildings silhouetted against the night sky. These strings of lights, the kind normally used for festivals and weddings, are everywhere at the crossing, illuminating the General Post Office (a glorious example of Mumbai's Indo-Saracenic architecture) and adjacent stores and restaurants, draped over trees and across streets, blinking on and off. But while these lights might look like the trappings of an extravagant civic celebration, they actually comprise artist Ashok Sukumaran's Glow Positioning System (GPS), 2005. Using a software-controlling hand crank that, when turned by pedestrians, powers the lights, Sukumaran (who presented his work this year at the first Singapore Biennale) has transformed the busy thoroughfare into a fantastic panorama--and indeed, into a kind of beacon for a new Indian art scene whose denizens deploy electronic and digital media, as well as video, film, and interdisciplinary research practices, to address the urban landscape and population.

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There are many megalopolises in India, but Mumbai is the one that showcases the country's economic growth--and its internal rifts. Its cityscape has undergone massive development in recent years, and the trend continues: According to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the Mumbai-Shanghai plan, a controversial development scheme designed to pack the city's skyline with the starchitecture of a globalized metropolis (enabling Mumbai, per the plan's name, to compete with the glitter of modern Shanghai), will have completely transformed the city by 2010. And yet 60 percent of Mumbai's sixteen million inhabitants presently live either in Dharavi--home to more than a million people, making it the largest slum in all of Asia--or in one of the city's many other impoverished areas. This reality does not match up with the municipal self-image being fostered by Mumbai, of course, and so countless slums are being torn down. (Further underlining the divide between image and reality, Maximum City, home of Ramoji Film City--the largest film production company in the world--actually abuts Dharavi.) Paradoxically enough, the Mumbai-Shanghai plan's focus on the visible symptoms of overpopulation and poverty, rather than its causes, has thus far recapitulated many of the Chinese city's urban-planning failures--already leaving, for example, at least two hundred thousand people displaced in the slums' deconstruction.