What's cooking at the Bose Krishnamachari Laboratory of Visual Arts

Bose Krishnamachari's LaVA installation is a contemporary-temporary laboratory for the people -- an archival project of contemporary visual art practices culled from museums, institutions, galleries, shops and streets from major art capitals.

"But I like to call it a full scale intervention," says Mehta. 

"I mean Bose has spent 20 years as an artist, curator, collector and philanthropist. He's interested in architecture, design, furniture and so much more. He wants to pose a challenge to existing institutions and their outmoded pedagogy and he's trying to make available what he really missed during his student years."

"The Library contains books, DVDs and CDs that cover a range of visual art practices like cinema, architecture, design, fashion, cultural studies and philosophy that Bose has individually selected during his travels. The exhibit also shows a collection of art objects wildly varying from Damien Hirst, to Sudarshan Shetty, to Andy Warhol and Nikhil Chopra."

Bose describes The Laboratory as "a room within an institution, an art project within a museum, for dissemination of knowledge and information, moreover, how that may govern the way we look at objects within a gallery or a museum space."

He says, "This growing work-in-progress could occur at the three-point interfaces posed by the installation itself, the audience’s behavioral reactions to it at various levels, the possibility for open-ended restructuring within different architectural situations, and the presence of the artist’s intent. The real challenge is the way it traverses the thin edge between 'art space' and 'space art'."

"Or do what I do," suggests Mehta. "Think of LaVA like entering a dream space, where, for a lover of contemporary art, whatever you wish and wished for is all already there."

LaVA is on till Janury 29 at Gallery BMB, Queens Mansion, GT Marg, Fort, tel. +91 (0) 22 2200 0061; www.gallerybmb.com