An artist sees what others miss. For Sameer Kulavoor, the daily walks down the broken pathways of Borivli, the odd roadblocks, unpaved bricks, and heaps of cement lying around, were all ‘peculiar images’. “I am constantly taking notes, photographing, or recording,” the 42-year-old artist shares. This constant reshaping of the Maximum City’s limits emerges as the theme for the artist’s latest exhibition, Limits of the Town, at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum.

Kulavoor was invited by Museum trustee and curator, Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, to explore the idea starting from the Museum’s archive of the city’s urban plans. “One was aware of the Fort and the history of the Fort. But it was fascinating to see the drawings,” he shares. Among the elements that caught his eye were the plaques about the city limits of early Bombay in the vicinity of the Museum itself. “I remember seeing it in the early ’90s, and I was fascinated by how you could put down a marker to the city. Most older cities have forts and walled cities from the time of their early defence. We [in Mumbai] have completely lost any trace of it except for these records and maps,” he elaborates.