If you are familiar with Anish Kapoor’s work, you may be excited to hear that we are going to meet the man in a few days. Read the rest of this blog for details on how this came about.

For those of you unaware of this Indian born artist, you may recognize his large public sculpture called Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park. He moved to London in the early 70s for art school and has been based there ever since. He is now one of the world’s most influential sculptors.

Currently, his recent work is on exhibition here in Mumbai - marking his first exhibition in India. In lieu of art class this week, we brought the Dharavi kids to the Kapoor exhibition. So with 20 kids and ACORN’s committee members (our hosts), we walked hand-in-hand from Dharavi to the Kapoor’s Mehboob Studios exhibition in trendy Bandra.

Cultural opportunities do not come along often for this group of children - and I was impressed at how well behaved they were in the midst of the strange playground of artistic oddities. It is no surprise that they had a fantastic experience at the exhibition. The massive space is filled with oversized mirrors that distort both the object in it and the background - turning the already surreal space into something from another world. With equal parts circus-fun-house and contemporary-art-gallery, the kids took in the exhibition with all the joy and wonderment you can imagine. Just being there to see their reactions to such a strange environment was priceless, and I’m still not sure who “got more” out of the whole field trip - the kids or us just watching their amazement.

Click through photos of our field trip to the Anish Kapoor exhibition and continue the story below…

In a bizarre stroke of coincidence and/or serendipity, we stumbled across a unique find upon our return to Dharavi: discarded canisters from Shooting Into The Corner; a central piece of the exhibition we had just experienced! From this piece, a canister of red wax is shot from a cannon onto a white wall every 12 minutes, constantly evolving the sculpture/painting with each shot.

60 of these thick paper shells are used each day. So the canisters made their way from one of the world’s most premier contemporary artists to the “slum” streets of Dharavi; in fact we were all shocked with the disconnect. So shocked that we are still working to make sense out of what this means.

With recycling being a central theme in our project, we contacted the management of the Kapoor exhibition and arranged to have a shipment of empty shells set aside for us to include in our exhibition. The final form the shells will take is still to be determined, but needless to say we are excited to be able to give them a 2nd life in the form of art; a continuation of Anish Kapoor’s right in the heart of Dharavi!

Perhaps even more exciting is the fact that Mr. Kapoor took an interest in the people of Dharavi as a result of our field trip - I made sure he got copies of the photos above! We are now schedule to give him a tour of Dharavi and explain what we have discovered during our time here. Stay tuned for an update on what comes from this interesting twist of fate.