Exhibition at NMACC | Multiverse of madness

You enter a brightly coloured maze. You encounter floor-to-ceiling photographs that seem to have been created expressly to disorient you. A nose crashes through a mirror. Assorted beetles converge on a butterfly. You’re climbing up into a spaghetti-filled space. It consumes you as you consume it.This is no drug-fuelled flight of fancy or dystopian nightmare. It’s the first floor of TOILETPAPER’s exhibition Run as Slow as You Can, on view at the Art House at Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) till October 22.The creative studio and image-only magazine founded and run by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari in 2010 has created this ever-evolving, oversaturated, hyperreal universe. In the world’s largest-ever showing, the one at NMACC involves four chapters across four floors. Through its intense visuals, Run as Slow as You Can questions how much is too much in a world where we’re constantly bombarded by stimuli.After you find your way out of the labyrinth named ‘Take a Left, Right?’, you’re suddenly flying in a blue sky, using white fluffy clouds as stepping stones. ‘Is There Room in the Sky’ gives you a sense of the surreal as you float through the meta-universe, meeting various creatures along the way—a black stallion, a toad sandwich, a clutch of chickens on a guitar. In the next gallery, you find a house. The radio in the kitchen hisses static, the rug reveals serpents, the spaghetti walls close in on you. The jazz-y wallpaper in the living room doesn’t hold your attention as much as the dead body under the carpet does.As you step into the antacid pink bathroom, you are hyper-aware that you’re sharing it with a bunch of strangers. A white-haired diva perches on the commode. Another septuagenarian wonders aloud why the terrycloth napkins are labelled TOILETPAPER.Meanwhile, a darkened room has virtual reality pods with seemingly dismembered limbs peeking out. We skip the line for this and hurry to the next room, sinking into an armchair to watch the screen. It’s a roomful of people, but each one is cocooned in their private world of consumption, just as we are in real life with our screens, interpreting the images flashing at us. For some, it’s colourful creativity; for others, it’s pure nonsense. For us, it’s an opinionated take on our mindsets, and the world we inhabit.When you go up to the red-on-red Control Room above, from where you can voyeuristically view the entire house you just explored, you feel a sense of beginning as much as an end. Objects from TOILETPAPER’s Milan office are displayed here, including pithy messages in neon. ‘All We Need is Less’ reads the one that has the most visitors queuing up to get a picture with it. Whether they take that thought with them beyond the exhibition or not, we do think that the essence of Run as Slow as You Can has seeped into the collective conscious in between the giggles and the guffaws, the poses and the selfies.Edited By: Shyam BalasubramanianPublished On: Sep 7, 2023

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