Eugene Flandin was an adventurer who travelled as an orientalist and a socio-grapher documenting West Asia. His approach and reason to be there was somewhere seduced by the want to be in the Orient, somewhere as an agent of France’s imperial conquest for a mandate in ancient Mesopotamia and as an artist. His detailed drawings of Persepolis and accounts on the Qajar Dynasty informs of what we think of Iran outside the Islamic Revolution. Aurélien Mole has documented exhibitions for somewhere around a decade harnessing the practice of creating a perspective of a document around an art work, that might already dwell in the same vision. Not far from Paris in the more depressed part of industrial France is the city of Brest. Here at the Center for Contemporary Art - Passerelle he currently has a solo presentation in response to a call for an exhibition ’Gateway’ to the centre. Tongue in cheek Mole sent a proposal for an exhibition called Benin a word that can be easily mistaken for Benign. But Benin is a country in West Africa and a region in Nigeria that is known for the longest history for producing the most sophisticated bronze and wood sculptures that are prized throughout the world. The French word for ’Benign’ is ’Benin’.

The students of the Sir JJ School of Art after their degrees in sculpture often get absorbed into the numerous ateliers that are based in the city’s suburbs. Here they cast in fibreglass murals and sculptures that then adorn the Neo-Greco Palladian lobbies of the numerous skyscrapers in the city that promise homes akin to New York living. A practice in craft then engulfs their lives. Aurelien Mole passed through academies that had given up traditional didactics of a Fine Art Academy, they had become places that allowed only conceptual art. Sculpture after the ’Arte Povera’ revolution and the dependence on the found object had become streamlined in its aesthetic. Mole rather preferred to question the homogenous representation of the idea which he often encountered in the exhibitions he documented. Therefore his workshops began with a nihilistic effort at sculpting soap from mounds of mud and refuse pieces of marble lying around in the college courtyard. The students had to use the soap until it got to a bespoke style that reflected their use of a diminishing commodity. They then replicated it in a material that would last forever.

Aurelien Mole lead the students to a walkathon around the city of Bombay studying the mural reliefs designed by Lockwood Kipling the famous Dean of the JJ School at the Crawford Market. He them made them distinguish the animal motifs and the design at the fountains in the market and the bases of pillars at the CST Terminus previously known as Victoria Terminus, one of the grandeurs of the British Raj that dwarfed St. Pancras of London. The students were to decide which element they would choose from the monuments if a French style revolution would occur and out of popular demand relics of the previous regime were to be destroyed. This happened in India post independence and we visited the garden outside the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum or the Ex- V& A of Bombay , which now also serves a graveyard of the city’s imperial sculptures of long gone Viceroys and Empresses. The students began to measure the hand of Queen Victoria , another liked Lord Hardinge’s hand on a book and Meher Vahid chose the only monument that glorified the working woman in art deco at the New India Assurance Building.

The students have for weeks worked on hard and unrelenting yellow basalt stones commonly known as Malad Stone. Their perspectives of sculpture have changed , their view on the idea of ’Modern Art’ has been questioned. Their ability to deal with the question of the conceptual has been strengthened and they have understood the inheritance they receive as students of the sculpture department at the Sir JJ School of Art and its relationship with the city. An artist who has played with the idea of the document and the perception has made a solo that entails the presence of a largely curated collaborative group exhibition that manages multiple voices in art. Aurelien Mole has translated his experience with a vocabulary that is not akin to the vocabulary of art in the Occident. He parasites them by laying the sculpted stones on aluminium beds filled with red laterite soil, debris and planted with the city’s common parasites that dwell in the cracks of Neo-Gothic buildings - the long rooted Peepul and Banyan trees.