Manish Nai: Paper City and the Ghost Modernity

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition held at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, December 5, 2018–March 7, 2019. "As a heap of romance novels and legal manuals enter the artist's studio, [Manish] Nai is neither invested in their erotic grammar nor in the pronouncement of juridical principles, but rather the gradient of yellow that runs through the outer skins of these books. One cannot help but think of a forlorn lover or a historic appeal waiting between pages—and reckon that we are a country of longing and unfinished business. The artist treats the thousands of books as building blocks, losing their individual character and authorship to become compressed scalar members within vertical architectural schemes. His creative output becomes a performative taxonomy of discarded and resold items—each bearing traces of prior possession. The wear and tear of an intimate economy is maintained in its raw essence, accumulating as an architectonic maze inside the white cube. By covering a cen