Diwali 2022

The Art of Spatial Representation

The Art of Spatial Representation
by Anuj Daga and Prashant Prabhu
presented at the Nine Fish Art Gallery, Byculla
16th November 2022, for Art35 event 


The notion of "space" has been central to both; the discipline of art as well as architecture in equal measure. The creation of this framework of space is what essentially gives context and meaning to our material reality and built environment. Thus, the act of representation of this space is crucial in the way we come to perceive and thereby create our realities.

While Euclidean planar geometry in the west produced buildings such as the monumental Pyramids, Greek cultures introduced the principles of ideal proportions in the Parthenon. Artistic experiments in the perfection of perspective drawings during the Renaissance were reflected in the axial and symmetrical urban spaces whereas the development of Cartesian coordinate geometry resulted into the monotony of the modernist building blocks. Alongside in the East, the Mughal and Pahari miniature paintings beautifully interwove time and space into an indistinct continuum with their free form flattened and skewed perspectives while Chinese gardens seem to emerge from their own unique ways of oblique representations.

However in the present day, the predominant form of houses all over the globe appear to be homogeneous and cookie cutter representations of the “notion of a house”. Could this sameness around us be related to the way in which we have come to understand and visually represent space today? Through an overview of different visual traditions of spatial representation across time and cultures, this presentation/conversation attempts to lay out the shifts in conception and creation of the built environment.

How does the nature of representation of space affect the way in which we imagine and intervene within our creative practice? How can the existence of various artistic practices be crucial in order to interrogate the established norms through which architectural spaces get represented today? Conversely, how can artists employ techniques of spatial imagination within the conception/imagination of their own work? This presentation is an invitation to interrogate and rethink the modes and means of imagining spatial realities to locate contemporary practice in art and architecture.

Download Presentation here

Cultural Retrofits \ Insert Exhibition, 2014

Domestic Fragilities

concept note for an exhibition curated by Farah Siddiqui and Natasha Mehta as an extension to the project 'Life with Objects'

Domestic Fragilities

More often than not, we seek that our homes have permanent fixes - in the furniture we build, in the fixtures we install or even in the finishings we invest in. Our domestic landscape in large parts comes to be defined by the mantra of durability. It might however be misleading to think of homes as places that accommodate mere permanence. In fact, they are the spaces that hold the very transitory and gradually depreciating physicality of life. We create the myth of permanence around us only to hold the escaping fragile human condition. In living with objects then, it is the fragile wares that mirror our state of being. Our investigations on life with objects extends into exploring this very condition of domestic fragilities which brings us to consider objects with care, attentiveness and sensitivity while they continue to silently serve their function with utmost artfulness.

The notion of ‘domestic fragilities’ is particularly relevant at the cusp of coming out of a pandemic. The present times have resulted in increased attention to our bodies and considered contact with the world around us. Ceramic is one material that expresses the precarity of this lived phenomenon more intimately than any other. Historically, baked clay and earthenware allowed humanity to store grains preparing them towards eventualities of droughts and floods. Across many cultures, earthen vessels are symbolically instituted and broken in order to mark life and death. Ceramics have remained principal objects of exchange that record lives and landscapes of their times. As objects that may be broken, damaged or destroyed more easily than others, engaging with delicate wares like ceramics within our domestic spaces quietly inculcate within us values of caution, attention and sensitivity.

In quietly sitting and serving our everyday needs, ceramic wares allow us to reflect on our gently transforming selves. They sit in different corners of our homes - on tables, in chests, our bedsides, showcases, kitchen racks – creating new equations with our bodies, reminding us to approach things with tenderness. Different cycles of time are embedded in their usage. They may be used to preserve and protect perishables over long months, hold flowers or fragrances for weeks or insulate us to the heat of the moment while sipping our morning tea or coffee. Ceramic wares may not be timeless, rather they respond to time in different ways. In being brittle, ceramics demonstrate the unique quality of holding toughness and weakness together in its materiality. The subconscious consideration of these contrasting aspects is what makes ceramics artful. It is in the realisation of such domestic fragilities that we become more human.

 

Artwork by Apurva Talpade

This is a piece of work by artist Apurva Talpade. Apurva has been toying with blocks for a long time. 

For this work, she collected a variety of figures from miniature paintings, and brought them together to create a world of their own. Each figure enjoys its own space while being self absorbed. None of them require the other necessarily. They exist in their own company, happy and joyous. The horse, the elephant, the peacock, the fist, or even the tree, flower cloud and umbrella - precisely know where they have to be. There is no expectation from any other creature to be anywhere else. In their gentle dispositions, they create and inhabit their own worlds. 

Block prints are more often than not conceived in a manner of repetition, and regularity. Apurva has pinned this work on her wall, which I kept gazing for a long time. What glued me to the work is the tension created between these figures through the white space left between them. The strategic distribution of empty space allows each object to be within their own world. To be sure, there is no larger world within Apruva's canvas. This clever balance of disparate figures co-existing within the same frame is the perhaps the success of the work. My note here is very underdeveloped, precisely because I am still trying to figure out why I am enjoying this work so much.

Until I find answers, please do look at Apurva Talpade's other works. 

Under Construction // 2018

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

an exhibition curated by Anuj Daga
5th to 10th December 2018
Delhi.




Landscapes of construction have become common sites of encounter within everyday life in South Asian cities. Infrastructural expansions, large scale housing and institutional projects along with repairs and redevelopments seem to perpetually churn people within the flux of construction activity. On the one hand, the manoeuvring of construction sites plead for us to deal with blockages, dangers, risks, inconveniences and diversions thereby demanding in us a slowness to labour the growing city; and on the other hand, they infuse amazement and amusement in our everyday routine. Thus, contemporary urban life in South Asia inevitably gets produced within the poetics and politics of construction. In perpetual making, its cities allude to ruins, waiting to be completed, suspending us in an uneven field of promise and hope. Bodies and desires remain as incomplete as our built environment. Life and action intuitively begin to articulate form and intent in the tension of the finished and the unfinished.

How and what do people negotiate with and draw from constructions around them in their everyday? What new relationships get forged in living through the cumbersome, irritant, yet hopeful environments of sites under construction? How does construction aesthetic inform everyday life and thinking? How does growing up in a landscape of construction shape and feed into cultural production of a place and people? This project brings together seven artists / architects whose works draw from sites under construction, or who strategise its logic to open up new readings and relationships with the ever changing environment. In the process, they attempt to open up a discourse on the aesthetics and politics of construction.

Under Construction may offer an appropriate positioning for South Asian cities as a place of longing and hope but more so as one that invents new forms of life within the process of becoming. New vantages are extended to us in diversions and new places are formed in the crevices of inconvenience. In their journeys of making, objects and spaces carry a multiplicity of dispositions that may hold immense possibilities of adapting and intervening into emerging urban dynamics. Construction sites offer rich metaphors in order to understand life and work as an ongoing practice. They shift our attention from products to processes, from objects to tools and from solutions to possibilities, which may allow us insights into new geometries of speculation.

participating artists: Avijit Mukul Kishore, Karthik Dondeti, Nisha Nair-Gupta, Poonam Jain, Pratap Morey, Ritesh Uttamchandani, Shreyank Khemalapure

Here is a link to the catalog:

Curatorial Intensive South Asia Brochure



Images from the exhibition:

Under Construction

Seven artists / architects draw ideas inviting us to engage in the poetics and politics of living that reveals in the manoeuvring of construction sites around them - those that demand in us a slowness to labour the growing city on the one hand; and infuse amazement and amusement in our everyday routine on the other.

5th - 10th December, 2018, Khirkee Studio, S-4, Khirkee Extension, New Delhi - 110017

Avijit Mukul Kishore

The Concrete Lift

HD video, colour

28 minutes, loop

2018

Avijit Mukul Kishore has been filming the changing landscape around the building that he lives in, from the windows of his eleventh floor apartment, for several years.  He lives in the suburb of Borivali East in Bombay, which used to be an industrial area. With the very visible de-industrialisation of the city due to real-estate pressures, the landscape of this area began to change rapidly. The industrial landscapes were vast and largely low-rise. These are replaced by high-rise residential buildings which at present are around thirty storeys high.

The video presented looks at this changing landscape and scale - both of the city and the human body. The TATA Steel Wire Division factory, an important landmark in Borivali, was demolished after its operations shifted to a new site outside the city. In its place and all around came up residential buildings. These were built with the slow and systematic labour of young migrant workers, many of them in their teens. One sees in the film, how these workers toil through heavy rain and sun; through day and often night. Their implements and machinery look rudimentary and unsafe. When looked at through a telephoto lens, one can see them work with a playful sense of concentration, with their lean, young, but able bodies. These are the real bodies of workers, much romanticised in political and art history. The scale of a young male body in a dense urban landscape makes for an intriguing conversation with the exalted body of the labourer or peasant, as represented in most cultures. 

The video consists of observational material, looking at these young workers demolish and rebuild the city, at different times of day, across different seasons. 

Karthik Dondeti

The Discomposition Machine

software code, 24 inch screen

2018

Ideas about development within the public realm are received by people through several sources that flow through informal and formal channels. These are recorded in the form of reportage, journals, public announcements, popular discussion and independent reflections over the internet. Such literature becomes the field for imagination of occupying the yet-consolidating urban landscape. Drawing on five such online archives indexing architecture and construction since the last national elections, this project invites users to build “news” through the discomposition of text. The code created by architect and coder Karthik Dondeti harnesses fragments of text from chosen sources turning news itself into a work of urban fiction. It is here that the project makes a political commentary on the narrative of developmental politics. 

Nisha Nair-Gupta

Love Under Construction

artbook, digital print

4 × 6 inches

2018

‘Love Under Construction’ is a record of contemplations conceived in the longing for a companion and/in the city of Mumbai in its continual process of infrastructural transformation. Strung through metaphors of construction, and impressions of splashing concrete, city and life hallucinate and metamorphose into each other. 

Poonam Jain

Looking forward : Looking backward

water color on paper

91 cm × 150 cm each (set of four)

2018

Poonam Jain’s immersive water colours attempt to inhabit the landscape of construction equipment, scaffolds, large scale moulds, machines and frames within which the phenomenological experience of the city is suspended for the everyday passerby. The everyday act of looking forward and backward gets reconfigured when parcels of areas that we access regularly are cordoned off, diverted, blocked, rerouted. Tiny doorways within huge forms hint at the new passages created within the crevices and gaps of construction infrastructure, which also become temporary homes for migrant labour. Poonam’s drawings encapsulate the experience of entangled manoeuvrings of urban space in the prolonged state of being under construction.

Pratap Morey

A Tension - II

ink on Korean Hanji paper

79 cm × 143 cms

2017

Borrowed from the series ‘A tension”, Pratap Morey’s work presented here reflects critically upon the new infrastructures built for frictionless commute – namely the skywalks and the metros. Lifting up the people from the “messiness” of the ground, they often get too intimate to direct passers-by to peek into kitchens and bedrooms of those whose apartments are too close to these skywalks. Morey draws his artistic language from the superimposition of these infrastructures to highlight the fragmentation of the sky, the splitting geometry of cityscape, and the forever increasing tension between the old and the new.

Ritesh Uttamchandani

Afterlife

photographs on flex

10 × 10 feet, 10 × 3 feet

2018

Photojournalist Ritesh Uttamchandani notes: “As I move through the city of Mumbai, I am always looking for photographs - things with subtle humour, exploring not the beginning or the end, but the in-between. In the run up to the General Elections of 2014 and subsequent State elections after, I noticed a booming of political propaganda posters. In spite of various legislative actions banning these hoardings, politicians continue to use them in campaigns - directly or otherwise. Over time they have only gotten bigger and unpleasant.”

 

Afterlife is a photograph series that emerged from the ways people innovate these flex pieces into their everyday constructions. Upcycled by the city dwellers, they are used as covers for shops, sleeping mats, protection from rain or even temporary shelters. Of the several promises that politicians make over election campaigns - those including employment, pothole-free roads, healthcare, housing, etc.; these political flex-banners come to fulfil at least some, although quite amusingly, in their afterlife.

Shreyank Khemalapure

Waiting Bars

construction models

mild steel, galvanized wire mesh, borax, wood, fine aggregate

dimensions variable

2018

‘Waiting Bars’ is a building construction term, referring to the steel reinforcement bars left open ended in columns and beams to receive future additions. ‘Waiting Bars’ thus literally wait to take on more construction, or further life. 

Typically, additional foundations and columns are left around the existing building (even after completion) such that a couple of floors can be added above, or rooms can be extended sideways. Such frames give a unique character to buildings in the city, that have extended arms and frames around them.

This work attempts to extract ideas of time and growth embedded within construction processes and is derived from these incremental actions and their resultant architecture.  The objects presented here are under construction as long as the bars are waiting.