TUSHAR JOAG CONTINUED WITH HIS SELF-STYLED ROLE AS THE Bureau Chief of the mock-regulatory body - UNICELL International Department for Monuments and Edifices - in his new show, Reconciliation & Truth, at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, from the 12th to the 31st of January. Refining the idea he first explored in 2005 in Willing Suspension, Joag came up with works that exemplified the myopic approach preferred by blinkered bureaucrats to provocations that monuments inevitably seem to frame in the context of a changing world order. He offered an ingenious solution that balanced the desire for violent erasure (Babri Masjid, Bamiyan Buddhas, among other instances) with a will to neutralize culture-specificities. With an agenda to instal fragments of statues and buildings in a manner that hoped to do away with the complex particularities of location and belonging and create an anonymous ahistorical continuum, Joag's concept toed hard the flawed line of logic that institutions for heritage preservation have displayed on a number of public occasions - he did this by deliberately presenting a strategy that was gloriously absurd. The building Lenin and were those the legs and torso of Chairman Mao in a multi-buttoned coat? Life-size Lego blocks painted in bright greens, blues and yellows were assembled in the centre of the gallery-space through which you could see paintings of limbless, headless Buddhas sitting in padmasana against multi-coloured Pop-ish backgrounds (Enlightenment 1 - 7). Other panels on the wall held graphic novel illustrations of meetings, discussions and press conferences of the UIDME members, caught in the throes of earth-shattering cogitations. The indeterminate nature of the relic - a fibreglass ear with the embedded tail of a crashed plane, a digitless fiberglass hand held aloft on wooden boxes with steel cables, and a flattened fibreglass head with a metal pipe that ran over and ended in a gas-station tap, among others, drove home the apathy reserved for historical monuments by politicians who manipulate mobs using a formulaic mix of righteous indignation and community hurt. The hysteria created turns heroes into villains and iconic structures of national and international importance into sites of dismal rubble.