Simryn Gill's Indian debut, courtesy of the Jhaveris

On September 9 I went to an alternate space in Mumbai, for an art exhibition and its after party. 

The party is over, but the exhibition "Letters Home" -- artist Simryn Gill's first showing in India -- is on at 58A Walkeshwar Road till November 6 and is presented by ex-Christies Amrita Jhaveri and her sister Priya who run their independent art consultancy practice from here as well. 

Minimal to the point of being bleak, a shiny epoxy IPS floor and white walls greet you. 

It's one of those quintessentially Mumbai experiences: a nondescript building that doesn't prepare you for a space that feels like it could be in Manhattan or Berlin. 

All partitioning walls are broken, there's a central well that houses utilities, so the space around is free flowing and devoid of any furniture except a table and a couple of chairs at the entrance.

Greetings Gill

Simryn Gill's work has been virtually unseen in Mumbai. 

An artist who lives between Malaysia and Australia, Gill has shown at prestigious venues including the Tate Modern and at The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution and currently at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane -- but never before in India.

Splitting time between two cultures, Gill brings observations of integration, displacement and adaptability into her photographs. 

Small and in a square format, four black and white hand-printed photographs are from a series titled "Rampant" that show plants not indigenous to Australia growing rampantly in their new habitat as cash crops but also like "noxious weeds." 

Gill likens these images to immigrants. They are part of the landscape now, wanted or not.

In another photograph, a banana grove has the plants eerily dressed in clothes of immigrants; sarongs and Chinese dresses signifying that a community may take root and assimilate in foreign lands but a culture need not be forgotten. 

The next series, "My Own Private Angkor," is my favorite of the show.

Two walls are covered with photographs of an abandoned housing estate in Malaysia ripped for its sale-able components and simultaneously being reclaimed by nature. 

There's a resonance with the crowded way the photographs are hung,  and the nature of reclaiming a tropical forest in the relentless presentation of one photograph after another. But the photographs hold their own as individual compositions too. They are all unique prints, not "an edition of," as is the case often in photographic art for sale.

The series shows forlorn windowless rooms as window frames are stolen and electric wires ripped from walls, as the price for metal in local markets goes up, leaving strangely enigmatic forms in the exposed plaster.

Glass panes are propped against walls, a row of design tiles are embedded in the wall, rubber casing and random roots and branches creep in, forming stunning structural forms which Gill uses as found sculptures, photographing them as they are. 

She deliberately shoots them in black and white to enhance the formal composition.

And she catches them all in natural light over several visits. Light plays an integral part in all Gill's pictures, flooding in or quietly lighting up a corner.

There's melancholy in the stillness here. But then, just round a half wall, the show lightens.

Text pearls and typewriters

"Caress" is a series of graphite rubbings of typewriters on paper.

Gill took these rubbings off outdated machines still used in 'typewriter's lane' (once called Picket Street) near the Small Causes law courts in Mumbai's Kalbadevi area -- imprints of a machine that records histories and "small causes" outside the courts every day. 

In the transference the paper crinkles and adds a wonderful texture to the lightness of graphite. 

"Pearls" is worth delving deeper into when you come across the two covet-worthy paper bead chains.

Gill invites people to send in a book, then painstakingly cuts text or pictures into thin strips and rolls them to form "pearls," which are then beaded and strung. 

The result may be too delicate to wear, as these reconstructions give words a new meaning.

Nearby, on that shining epoxied floor I mentioned earlier, are matte, earthy balls of fibers of different plants, rubber bands and even the ordinary string that ties up cartons of fruit at Crawford Market. Titled "Mine," the word itself suggests digging into the personal, digging into memory, digging into remembrances.

The installation is not as potent as the photographs are. Perhaps I prefer alienation and melancholia. Even after I left the space my mind was still in Gill's surreal abandoned housing estate suffused in the natural softly shining light she captured so well.

Flat 2, Krishna Nivas, 58A Walkeshwar Road; tel. +91 (0) 22 2369 3639. Wednesday-Saturday, 12-6 p.m. and by appointment. Email info@amritajhaveri.com

Amrita Jhaveri has been active in the Indian art world since 1994 and is the author of "101: A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists" (Indian Book House, 2005).