Within the umbrella of the Mumbai Gallery Association, ANT is a longstanding tradition where art galleries keep their doors open after hours, way past their usual closing time. Exhibition previews and openings, often scheduled on the second Thursday, draw a large number of participants, who dedicatedly await the monthly ritual.

I arrived first at Akara Contemporary—housed at the century-old Amar Chand Mansion in Colaba—to be greeted by Keita Miyazaki’s intriguing exhibits. Abandoned automobile parts and origami assemble into complex sculptures. The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 changed the artist’s understanding of material. In Miyazaki’s world, half-wrecked structures floating through a city covered in a sea of debris metamorphose into a softer vision of an apocalypse. The exhaust pipes and car engine valves do not rupture into toxic fumes, they blossom into petals. They are not nuclear mushroom clouds but flowers, blooming at the end of the world.

A short stroll through the neighbouring Colaba market, past the art deco gem, Regal Cinema, brought me in front of Jamaat Art Gallery. The Urdu word indicates a larger community. Jamaat faces the 78-year old kebab chain Bademiya and at the rear stands a Methodist church. A faint Marathi folk tune invited me in, and an idol of Ganesha lined the ceiling. The distant sound of evening prayers from a mosque accompanied me as I walked to the next gallery. To reiterate, jamaat means community.

It teleported me to a simpler, more tolerant time; to the Bombay I had only heard of before moving here. The Bombay you only perhaps discover when you set out in search of art in the nooks and alleyways. It is the city you run into only on foot.

Walking is pivotal to the experience of ANT. Clustered around Colaba and Fort, most of these galleries are a stone’s throw from each other. Several groups like Art and Wonderment and Carpe Arte conduct walkthroughs for every edition. Informal groups, brought together by their love of exploring art, are also often seen snaking their way through the narrow streets.

The idea goes as far back as 2009 when Shireen Gandhy, Director at Chemould Prescott Road and Abhay Maskara, Curator at Gallery Maskara, were deliberating over the downturn in the contemporary art scene. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 had an impact on art across the world. “Many of us had started new galleries by 2007. We had commitments to our professions, to our artists, to the art world. One of the ideas that cropped up then was that we keep our galleries open for longer on certain days,” Gandhy tells us.

Gandhy, also the Mumbai Gallery Association spokesperson this year, notes that ANT has picked up tremendously from the time it started. “Going to galleries has become cool now, so much so that Art Night Thursday is also date night Thursday for so many. That is when you know that there is a culture-defining quotient to galleries,” she says.

A gallery becomes a space to socialise, to unwind, to just be—all in the presence of art. Initiatives like ANT have made things more democratic and accessible. It fosters relationships between galleries and puts artists, gallerists, collectors, enthusiasts, photographers and students in one room. There is something seductive about the culture of gallery-going in Mumbai, endowed with the spatial charm of the region that first made up the archipelago of the seven islands.

Galerie Isa, nestled in a beautiful boulevard of Ballard Estate, oozes with this charm. The neoclassical white pillars, arched doorways and high ceilings instantly command your attention. It is seldom that the gallery space is a gorgeous distraction from the artwork. German artist Michael Kunze’s paintings, however, cannot be looked away from. The spectacular show titled Asa Nisi Masa borrows its name from a popular catchphrase in Federico Fellini’s 1963 film Otto e Mezzo. An interplay of light, shadows and shapes is used to interrupt the narrative in Kunze’s metaphoric work. The result is intricately symmetrical yet extraordinarily abstract.

A growing appetite for humour in contemporary art can be felt in curation across several recent exhibitions. Sohrab Hura’s Ghosts in My Sleep at Experimenter featured works on paper made with gouache and amusing handwritten captions juxtaposed on the walls. Cats, holidays, dinners, chemotherapy and goodbyes— all come armoured with droll frivolity. Roshan Chhabria’s Lipstick Stories at Sakshi Gallery, too, was a tongue in-cheek depiction of the Indian middle-class. The illustrations were interspersed with text and the text, laced with deliberate misspellings and inconsistent conjugations. Some of the captions read: ‘Stree is Doing Istree (Iron-women)’, ‘Mardana Kamzori’, ‘Masala Dosa Making in Kochi’. It was like the artist is trying to parody himself. While using the same device, Hura’s sense of the ordinary is deeply personal and Chhabria’s unapologetically public and pulpy. The art does not take itself seriously, so we do.

To visit multiple galleries on one evening, read, soak in the sights, get to the next and repeat can be overwhelming. The very act of ‘gallery-hopping’ is exhausting. But here, interpretation takes a backseat to the experience. Being a part of something bigger is what makes it special. The spectator becomes a part of the spectacle. There is no curatorial synergy tying the exhibitions together, but the beauty of ANT lies in the space in between.

My walk was bookended by works of exceptional Japanese artists. The final stop was Gallery XXL, where street artist Aiko Nakagawa’s popular exhibition Follow the Bunny had attracted a packed room. Known as Lady Aiko, her signature Bunny motif, combining bricolage technique, spray painting, stencilling, brushwork and serigraphs, has been doing the rounds of the world since 2008. Placed against the maps of Mumbai’s local railway network, the Japanese iconography is infused with local milieu.

Like most significant works of pop art, Aiko’s Bunny thrives on repetition, like Andy Warhol’s ‘Soup Cans’ and ‘Marilyn Diptych’, Jasper Johns’s ‘Flag’, or Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings. The pop art movement emerged in the US as a reaction to the silos of traditional f ine art, borrowing heavily from mass culture. Tied to triteness and rooted in irreverence, the cult of pop art revels in its strange propositions. That it is heavily derived is perhaps what galls the purists but what is all art if not a derivation? It has brought art-watching closer to art-making. It makes a case for the spectator.

For more than a decade, Art Night Thursday has, literally and figuratively, lent colour to the cultural pulse of Mumbai. It is a testament to the presence of a people who care about art and want to engage with it. As the clock hit 9.30 pm—closing time for ANT—a few galleries dimmed their lights but the doors remained open and visitors lingered. My day ended with a bunch of strangers and a room full of art. Not a bad Thursday.