On the Shelf: With artist and archivist Gaurav Ogale

It started with a number: 406. A hotel room key, the metallic kind with a faded magnetic strip, framed in ornate silver and propped too neatly on a shelf. It caught the cold ghost-pale spill of a Zoom call’s glow making me stare at it longer than I should have. Who frames a room key? It was the kind of object that made a detective of me. Investigating the link between material and memory and meaning.

Slowly, subconsciously, this became a secret hobby. I started squinting, thumb and finger widening the frame, drawn to the peculiar grammar of strangers’ shelves. On Zoom calls, on Instagram grids, I looked behind shoulders, beside doorways, at the edge of sleep-lit rooms. It amazed me, the things that caught my eye. I wanted to inspect and study what they were doing to the room. Is the placement of objects always deliberate? How does a life measured in achievements and ambitions suddenly share space with a broken red lighter from a too-much-happened trip fifteen years ago? Is the shelf a kind of a diary, or just a capitalist graveyard with good lighting?

BH: If someone were to make a miniature diorama of your shelf, scaled down to fit inside a matchbox, which five things would have to be in it for it to still feel like yours?

GO: The silver fish spice box, the porcelain cat, the metal dragonflies, the silver bird and the plant.

BH: The plant has moved several homes with you. Was it always placed next to the shelf?

GO: I bought it when it was a baby. It’s a plant with magical powers. This plant, during all of Covid, survived by itself in my Bombay home which was locked with no one to water it or to take care of it. When I opened my home after months, everything had fallen apart, everything was covered in dust—except for this plant, which stood tall through it all. A miracle, indeed.

BH: How do you decide which artworks belong beside each other?

GO: Being an artist myself, one of things that I have always consciously tried to do is to collect art and chronicle the journeys of artists I admire. I think it’s very important that artworks live with other artists too and not just remain in storages of seasoned art collectors or museums. Whenever I am at the studio, creating, reading, or dreaming, I feel that I am in the company of all these beautiful minds whose work lives and breathes with me. I feel their presence, I feel that energy quite evidently.

BH: Take me to the most fragile thing on the shelf. How does it change the way you move around it?

GO: It would be this teapot. I am obsessed with teapots and am always scavenging flea markets to find them. This one I found in Berlin and it actually has a beautiful, delicate lid. I use it sometimes to have tea but I tell myself that if it’s survived two long flight journeys and brutal airline staff handling, it can survive anything.

While I love every single inch of the objects and art I have, I am detached from them in many ways. I remember Madonna said in one of her interviews, something on the lines of, “We are not owners of anything, definitely not of our talents or material objects. Everything is a gift.” I too am quite okay with something breaking. It’s a journey that the object embodies and one must accept that and treasure the vestiges.

BH: When you dust or rearrange the shelf, do you find yourself remembering things you’d forgotten?

GO: I am fascinated by small objects. Like these two silver and golden fish which were traditionally used as spice boxes in Portugal, Italy and even in parts of India. I found these in Venice and I use the smaller one as a pendant most of the times. I place it inside a shell so no one usually sees it when they visit but I know exactly where it lives and every time I touch it, I somehow think of the many homes and kitchens it may have travelled to, the kind of people who might have used it, touched it. The languages, cultures, cuisines and stories the fish might have experienced before coming and resting in my abode.