Zainab Tambawalla's 'Seen Unseen' Draws A Portrait Of What We Forget To See In Mumbai

In Zainab Tambawalla’s latest collection, 'Seen Unseen', she draws inspiration from Mumbai. The city’s many facets flow into her vibrant watercolours, capturing moments that range from a man stretching before his morning run along Marine Drive ('A Shared Horizon Morning 1 & 2') to the workers who clear the city’s drainage systems ('Frame by Frame 1, 2 & 3'). By foregrounding these seemingly ordinary parts of Mumbai, Tambawalla nudges viewers to look beyond the fluff and glamour of the country’s ‘Mayanagari', the City of Dreams, and pause to notice the small details that truly shape a city’s structure and culture.

The collection unfolds in distinct chapters, each spotlighting a different aspect of urban life. One such chapter, 'Pipe Dreams', brings Mumbai’s water tankers into sharp focus, objects so familiar that they often fade into the background of the cityscape. With phone numbers, names, and symbols painted across their vividly coloured backs, each tanker becomes a visual archive of labour and survival. When I was younger and bored on long car rides, my parents and I would play a game, adding up the digits on these phone numbers to pass the time. That childhood memory echoes Tambawalla’s impulse: reframe what we take for granted what we see so commonly in our lives. These vehicles are everywhere, from major arterial roads to the corners of the smallest streets, yet they are largely overlooked— even as they reveal how Mumbai continually negotiates scarcity. Tambawalla’s works position these tankers as the main characters, drawing attention to every dent and burst of colour that makes them so uniquely Indian.

My personal favourite is 'Pipe Dream 12', which sees a man seated atop a tanker, his view possibly stretching from Mumbai’s unending traffic to the quiet blankness of a wall at a dead end. By leaving the surroundings undefined, Tambawalla invites the audience to imagine where these vehicles are situated, turning absence into a powerful act of participation.

Transforming the mundane into the meaningful, Tambawalla does something similar in the 'Stick No Bills' chapter, where she draws attention to the city’s electrical boxes as accidental public notice boards. Layered with advertisements, pamphlets, and political notices pasted one over the other, these surfaces become informal archives of the city’s daily negotiations. Found on almost every street corner, the electrical box emerges as a symbol of Mumbai’s rapid transformation and the constant stacking of lives that define the city.

While speaking about the storytelling behind the 'Stick No Bills' chapter Tambawalla says, "The fact that in a city where space is so limited, even things that are part of your infrastructure become a blank canvas. They serve somebody's livelihood, people build businesses around them, there's a cobbler, and all kinds of people who work with these kind of things. Even the person who sticks the bills or the ads that you see differ. There's so much storytelling and layering that actually emerges from observing a small object in a city like this."

Seen Unseen feels like an invitation to pay attention, lingering in the spaces we are conditioned to ignore. Through water tankers, pasted notices, and half-glimpsed figures, Tambawalla captures a Mumbai that exists between movement and pause. In noticing these overlooked details, we are reminded that the city is not just built by landmarks or skylines, but by the quiet, everyday systems and people that keep it alive.

You can follow Zainab Tambawalla on Instagram here, and buy the 'Seen Unseen' collection here.

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