Sit back on visual art

Where will you find Charlie Chaplin peeping from a high-back chair, Mata Hari sneaking a mysterious smile from a diaphanous curtain, Frida Kahlo peering intensely through a cushion, and a bejewelled, sari-clad Raja Ravi Varma woman staring down a four-poster bed? In an art gallery? A book-nook? A funky store? No. In Bioscopewalli, actually. Wait, you cannot call it a funky furniture store. It has linen and jewellery as well. Call them ‘creations’. Describe them as visual art. That’s the preferred adjective of Vanita Omung Kumar, film and television set designer, who calls Bioscopewalli her ‘breather’.

As my car swerved off New Link Road in Andheri, Mumbai, I looked for the Bioscopewalli signboard, a name on the gate, but there was nothing. Just a stern security guard in black and an old-world telephone booth painted poppy red. I stopped by the booth knowing that was my destination. I went by the presumption — only an applied art graduate and production designer can afford to do away with a loud board and settle for a red phone-booth as a marker. One would naturally expect something different from a woman who has designed sets of at least 15 Hindi films, including Black , Saawariya , Love2050 , Chameli , television serials like Ramayana , Prithiviraj and others.

I push the large, wing-shaped doorknob and step into the recently opened store. A naked woman in mesh floats mid-air, a painted horse hangs from the ceiling, a fibre tree curves near a concrete grotto, glass bottles hang from the branches, and stained-glass windows borrow the winter afternoon’s gleam. There are chairs with unusual prints, tables with a Michelangelo-esque nude curled on the top, Frida in Andy Warhol-ish colours on a jaali , a bird-box in wood, magenta bougainvilleas painted on white arches, and the signature high-back chairs with Mona Lisa. Everything limited edition, handcrafted sedulously, and created by Vanita, who loves black and Spanish Catalan designer Antoni Gaudi.

At Bioscopewalli, the entire world seems to be the inspiration: Mexican, Christian, Renaissance, Mughal, Indian, Byzantine, erotic… One collection appears straight out of a flea market, another iridescent with its opulence; the erotic line is incredibly seductive and the arty pieces borrow from all things beautiful. Christian influence is predominant, as is the presence of women — Mata Hari, Frida Kahlo, Mona Lisa, Rembrandt’s buxom women. Vanita explains that these influences are not random. “I feel very connected to Christianity” and “I like strong women because I am one”, she says.

However, what she loves the most is ‘found art’, anything that is used, lived in. Not surprisingly, a lot of her furniture has the ageless ‘distressed’ look, diligently created in teak or sheesham in her Mumbai workshop. Her fascination for ‘found art’ metamorphoses a shoe clip into a chandelier earring; five brooches become one stunning bracelet; earrings get displayed on an antique wrought-iron cage; pages of an old dictionary become canvases on which faces have been hand-painted and framed in wood… A dirty refrigerator gets a vinyl artistic sheath, the air-conditioner is dressed in what looks like a colossal sepia postcard; a high shoe-shine chair becomes the sunbed, and the Houdini box a table for your beer tankard.

It was on the sets of Saawariya that Vanita “felt the need to do something with my creative intellect, and the idea to design and create a world of my own was born then”. It took four years for the Bioscopewalli dream to become a reality. Vanita, however, is never far away from dreams. While her husband, Omung Kumar, is gearing up to direct Priyanka Chopra as champion boxer Mary Kom in the biopic, Vanita is working on two musicals and her passion to do something for animal welfare.

Pictures by the author, and courtesy Bioscopewalli

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