Apurva Talpade

Borivali station as a site to visit and draw out experience. Devices that are prosthetics / machines / costumes that mediate the sense landscape of the drawing, or become humorous-ironical interpretations of the practices in the drawing.


The peculiarity/specificity of the forms of the shops of the platforms, becoming one large unwieldy imagined shop, accessible from all directions and surfaces.
A fascinator, with many lightweight images of all that might entice you suspended from it and encircling the wearer when worn. It turns, and the eye may settle on whatever catches the wearer’s fancy.


A vantage that takes in a sweep from the adjacent skywalk to the overhead bridge and the platforms below, exaggerating the scales to extend what the eye can take in.


Practices of the skywalk, laid out as an unfolding map, each elevation falling open on its corresponding side: part miniature drawing, part gameboard.
A device of many mirrors, opening and collapsing on itself, in order to fragment and hold the surroundings.


An anatomical drawing of the platform: its skeletal trusses, stiff skin like corrugated roofs, the bundles of wires and pipes its nervous system, laid bare and drawn closely.


The platform, this time disappeared beneath the press of bodies awaiting the next train.


Parts of the station forced together in an awkward drawing that yet manages to produce a reading of space that is inconvenient and yet compelling.
A putting together of objects and surfaces that mimic the troublesome perspectives in the drawing.


The nimbupaani stall and all the actions around all the machinery and accoutrements of the small space in a layered drawing.


The overhead bridge and the platform underneath - both densely crowded but with differently performing bodies, different tensions in postures, different paces and gaits, different kinds of idlenesses.


Engaging with solitude as an uncommon way to see the station. It is a station where the eye can linger on the rows of chairs outside the waiting room, on the errant wire loose from the electrical conduits, on the seeming endlessness of the empty platform. It is a drawing suffused with waiting.


A camera-like panorama, bulging and tapering to take in consecutive platform numbers 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and 8.


Two drawings that hover over the station, unfolding from a series of continuous vantages that make a straight line. Drawing the tracks and platforms from one bridge, then moving to the successive bridge and continuing the drawing, and so on and on to make a long scroll, the tracks meeting and parting, the platforms opening in elevation along their stretch, the overhead wires forming a lengthwise jumble.


A series of drawings following the crowd: one peels the roof back to show the passing of pedestrians on an overhead bridge, one stretches out a large waiting area where people are gathered and walking, waiting and passing, and the most potent of them all joins a throng as they collect in a mass that becomes a dense line on the escalator.


Closely drawn people encountered at the station. Bored and waiting youths, schoolgirls escorted by guardians, fisherpeople, the drawing becoming somewhat a platitude of the train goers, until you see the two men sleeping on the platform, oblivious and exhausted, a sight that is difficult to assimilate into our lexicon of the banal.


The flower sellers in the vast market abutting the station, deftly making garlands. The drawing sees him at different scales, now threading the marigold, now sorting the flowers in the bucket, now resting surrounded by his piles of loose flowers.
A nifty wheel with a steady curved threaded needle on its stand. A pipe attached to the wheel holds a row of flowers and when the wheel is turned, the pipe passes the flowers over the needle and a garland is strung together.


And many more.