EASTWARD: explorations along mumbai’s eastern seaboard

 

Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke is delighted to present Sunhil Sippy’s first solo exhibition, EASTWARD: explorations along mumbai’s eastern seaboard.

Sunhil's photographic practice engages with questions of time and landscape, inviting viewers to encounter Mumbai through his distinct sense of its rhythms and changing moods. He describes his work as emerging from an instinctive and subconscious draw to particular spaces along the city’s eastern seaboard. Compiled from an archive of several hundred images made over more than a decade, Eastward reveals time as accumulation. Some sites required several visits before yielding an image worth keeping, allowing changing light, altered structures, and the slow sharpening of feeling to enter the work.

Sunhil stretches the boundaries of the photographic image, moving between both 6x6 and 35mm analog, experimenting with double exposure and formerly discarded negatives, as well as digital formats. The photograph is rendered not simply as a form of representation, but also as a material object. The textures that his photographs carry—their tonality, their surfaces of lightness, density and graininess—are all integral to how his chosen locales are perceived. In his more recent photographs, Sunhil has avoided the use of the viewfinder, allowing him to look directly at the landscape or subject rather than through the mediating frame of the camera. Affect becomes central here: the image emerges not simply as representation, but as a record of mood and the intensities that pass between photographer and place. With this exhibition, Sunhil makes us privy to his own emotional consciousness.

What emerges, then, is not the singular decisive moment of the capture, but a temporality of patience and repetition. Shipbreakers, cement loaders, salt pan workers, abandoned factories, dumping grounds, and pipelines are all brought into view: hidden worlds of a city that are as neglected as they are critical. Though geographically close to the celebrated western skyline, this eastern universe often remains unseen, eclipsed by a city increasingly imagined through redevelopment and reconstruction.

Many of the images dwell in transitional zones where categories collapse. A derelict structure may also be a habitat for vegetation; reclaimed land may carry traces of older ecologies; industrial terrain may hold sudden pools of reflective water. Trees coil around concrete and metal, roots push through damaged surfaces, mangroves persist at the edge of expansion. Nature here is a resistant force that survives within hostile environments. To borrow from Robert Adams, beauty in photography often lies in an image’s ability to create coherence without denying damage, fragility, sorrow, or endurance. Sunhil’s photographs achieve this by holding decay and resilience within the same frame, inviting new ways of seeing landscapes shaped by precarity.

–– Anisha Palat

 

 

Sunhil Sippy was born and raised in London and earned an English Literature Degree from Georgetown University in 1994. In 1995 he moved to Mumbai to pursue a career in Film and Advertising. He directed his debut film Snip! in 1999 which won the National Award for Best Editing (2001). He later transitioned to Advertising, directing commercials for over 20 years. Sunhil’s relationship with Mumbai has been that of an outsider visiting a place that feels familiar ­­–– something that seeps into his photobooks, The Opium of Time and RACEDAY (a documentation of the Mahalakshmi Racecourse and its ecosystem), as well as his first photo-exhibition, EASTWARD: explorations along mumbai’s eastern seaboard. Sunhil collaborates on various projects as photographic archivist and documentarian. Over the length of his career, he has been associated with several philanthropic organisations. He lives in Mumbai, a city that has become his muse, and continues his explorations balancing his roles as a director, photographer, and flâneur.

 

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