MUMBAI, Jan. 12 -- Deonar, Mumbai's vast dumping ground in the eastern suburbs, usually enters public consciousness as data: tonnage figures, court deadlines, aerial images of smouldering hills. It is seen from above, discussed at a distance, and quickly forgotten. At Necropolis of Remains, presented by Priyasri Art Gallery during Mumbai Gallery Weekend from January 8 to 11, those same mountains of waste are stripped of abstraction. They are rendered intimate, human and disturbingly alive, asking viewers not what Deonar is, but what the city chooses not to see. The exhibition takes its cue from Mountain Tales, journalist Saumya Roy's deeply reported account of life in and around the Deonar landfill, one of Asia's largest dumping grounds and one of Mumbai's most wilfully ignored realities. The book is not treated as a script to illustrate but as a provocation. What emerges instead is a layered excavation of waste, what it means materially, politically and emotionally, and of the lives entangled with it. Nine young artists, Arun B, Aasha Keshwala, Hina Bhatt, Raka Panda, M D Mussthafa, Rashesh Chauhan, Simran Chowdhury, Subhasmita Ghadei and Suraj Kamble, all students or recent graduates of The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, participate in the show. Each artist was given Mountain Tales as a starting point, with the brief to respond rather than replicate. The resulting works resist literal narration, choosing instead to dwell in ambiguity: between visibility and erasure, endurance and exhaustion, survival and loss. That complexity came into focus during a Sunday morning discussion at the exhibition, where Roy was in conversation with writer and curator Anish Gawande. Gawande described Mountain Tales not simply as reportage but as an account of how garbage mountains are shaped by the city's consumption patterns, deep inequalities and administrative inertia. "When we think of Deonar, we think of it as a headline or a statistic," he said. "But in this book, the mountains come alive, beautiful in an eerie way, and deeply unsettling." Roy spoke candidly about how her decade-long engagement with Deonar began not as a literary project but through her work with a microfinance organisation whose borrowers were waste pickers. What struck her first was not only the physical toll of the work, bruised hands, damaged feet, but the strange pull the landfill exerted. "People would tell me they fell sick if they didn't go to the mountain," she recalled. "There was an almost addictive relationship with the place." That tension, between brutality and attachment, despair and dignity, runs through Necropolis of Remains. The works refuse easy moral binaries. Instead, they occupy the uncomfortable terrain Roy describes in her writing: a world where birthdays are celebrated beside toxic smoke, where faith and folklore coexist with trauma, and where the possibility of finding something valuable, metal, plastic, a fragment of hope, draws people back to the dump day after day. Several artists engage directly with material memory. Arun B's sculptural forms appear compressed and eroded, as though shaped by pressure over time, echoing the physical weight of accumulated waste. Hina Bhatt's ceramic works draw attention to the fragile dignity of marginalised labour, transforming everyday forms into quiet acts of resistance. Raka Panda and Simran Chowdhury reflect on consumption and invisibility through painterly surfaces that oscillate between documentation and metaphor, while M D Mussthafa's work carries the emotional residue of Deonar's landscape, haunting, intimate and unsettlingly familiar. Importantly, the exhibition does not aestheticise suffering. If anything, it complicates it. Roy cautioned against the outsider's temptation to romanticise darkness. Her own challenge, she said, was to remain truthful to her lived experience of Deonar, which included humour, generosity and community alongside decay. "In my memory, it was not a place of awfulness," she said. "It was a place full of life." That insistence on complexity shapes the exhibition's political undercurrent. The landfill is not presented as an inert symbol of failure but as a living system shaped by policy paralysis, court cases stretching back decades and the city's relentless growth. For Priyasri Patodia, founder of Priyasri Art Gallery, the exhibition reflects a long-standing commitment to working with archives, texts and young artists to challenge dominant narratives. Choosing Mountain Tales as the starting point, she said, was not about positioning students as underdogs but about offering them a serious intellectual invitation. "History is often written by those with power," she noted. "As gallerists and patrons, our role is to open eyes, to allow the next generation to form its own opinions."...