പൊന്നുപോലെ/Like Gold: Curated by Murtaza Vali

Golden flows link Kochi and the Malabar Coast to points beyond, notably across the Indian Ocean to the glittering megalopolises of the Arabian Gulf. As part of millennia-old networks of commerce, merchants and traders from as far away as Rome would exchange it for pepper and other spices, a practice later monopolized by the European empires that would come to dominate this economic sphere and exploited it to amass colonial fortunes. Through the second half of the twentieth century, the postcolonial Indian state’s imposition of substantial duties on gold’s import catalyzed the establishment of a shadow network of smugglers and middlemen whose activities circumvented these restrictions. Their financial success contributed to the emergence of Dubai as a “City of Gold,” a souk dedicated to the substance anchoring its historical urban core. This growing apparition has seduced waves of migrant workers to travel in the opposite direction in search of wealth and a better life, further entangling the fates, fortunes, and histories of the two regions.

Engaging gold as both myth and material, പൊന്നുപോലെ/Like Gold will explore this magical substance’s transactional and transmutational natures. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a colloquialism in Malayalam that expresses the, often intense, care and attention, both affective and material, lavished by a parent on their child. It carries with it both positive and negative connotations, of sacrificial devotion and pampered excess, of success and shortfall, of pride and disappointment. The “like” highlights gold’s metaphoric and metamorphic capacities, its near universal use as a symbol of value, worth and purity, and the way these social and cultural associations extend into other materials and mediums, producing an expanded aesthetic and semantic field of “chrysopoetics” or “making-gold.”