Building Ruins: RISD Alumni Show 2020

RISD Alumni Show 2020
Building Ruins

If we were to agree that our present is a mere left over of yesterday’s time-space and memory, we are merely engaged in building ruins. In the perpetual transformation of every now into a past, we produce in our present, the ruin of the future. Like sites under construction or swamps growing in decaying fields; building ruins characterize the simultaneity of creation and deterioration. Making and breaking is an integral part of growth. Much like child’s play, these opposing forces keep our curiosity in the world. It is through the process of doing and undoing that we find meaning within things around us and make them our own. Yet, trials, tests and experiments are often forgotten to end products. How do we write the biography of objects that are frozen into their state of becoming? Conversely, can objects find completion in their biographies?

In its constantly (d)evolving meanings, Building Ruins aims to generate an archive of objects and ideas by RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) practitioners that demonstrates the inherently interrogative nature of artistic endeavours. Through the archive, the curatorial ambition of the show is to present enquiries embedded within the practices of RISD alumni in India. It takes a closer look at their investment in the range of materials, techniques and processes that they constantly engage within their everyday. Building Ruins offers the possibility of exploring the play between the complete and the incomplete, permanent and impermanent, assembly and dismantling, fragments and wholes or even preservation and decay. The project inevitably demands a fragile tracing of a past into the present, yet maintaining its interpretive dimension for the future, invoked in its precautionary reading that too much building might lead to destruction.

Expanding on the notion of pure art, the project has consciously chosen a multidisciplinary approach that gathers not only artists, but also architects, graphic designers, textile designers, industrial designers who constantly engage and expand the boundaries of artistic thinking. This is uniquely enabled and evident in the RISD approach, where strict distinction between art and design is constantly challenged, blurred and redefined. Secondly, the exhibition stages novel experiments from unseen young designers alongside established practitioners of art and design. Not only does the show foreground absolutely new names in art, it also offers an opportunity for different generations of art practitioners to share values that still remain relevant and concerning to their practices. It promotes cross-pollination of ideas, knowledge and skills thereby promoting future collaborations and intellectual exchange. Lastly, the exhibition introduces design as an important function of art – one that cannot be separated while thinking of everyday environments. Thus, it demonstrates the promise of making our functional environments more artful.

Through a carefully crafted selection of ideas and responses to the curatorial theme of Building Ruins, the exhibition shall showcase about 20-25 works including (and expanding the limits of) paintings, photographs, books, installations, objects of art or designed artefacts, as well as ideas about living and environment. The curation, in its display, shall emphasize that art and design hold power to infuse meaning into otherwise mundane spaces. This shall be achieved through a careful interplay between objects within the exhibition, as well as the way in which they interact with the chosen spatial setting. In bringing together these fragments from art and design, the spatial design shall thus provoke the viewer to delve deeper into the potential of building ruins. The exhibition asserts the interdependence as well as the centrality of art and design in our everyday lives.


Anuj Daga
Curator