Volumes Exhibition

Volumes

Annual Exhibition, 2022-23 / February 8-11, 2023, 1000-1900 hrs IST 

How much space does architecture occupy? 

To be sure, the question of “how much,”  “space” and “architecture” are hinged around the conception of “volumes” - which one may consider as the fundamental act of composing architecture. The exhibition Volumes interrogates these three dimensions of quantities, enclosures and practice, at once, in different measures by indexing the  key ideas that emerged in the pedagogic experiments at the School of Environment & Architecture (SEA) during 2021-22.  

“How much” opens the question of measure through the drawing of phenomena and experience. ‘Volume’ as a vibrating sonic entity suggests the surpassing of the cartographic length, breadth and height towards the mapping of densities, intensities, closeness, sparseness as much as temporal expansions and contractions. These are some of the first impressions through which we begin to appreciate and assimilate space – those that otherwise remain folded into the pleats of memory. “How much” is a call to consider relativity, relook at standards, and formulate new methods of representing architecture through perceived phenomenon.

Moving beyond the ‘container’ logic of space has been one of the key concerns of spatial pedagogy at SEA. Speaking of ‘volume’ rather than a ‘building’ allows us to dwell upon programmatic mixings, power hierarchies, pressure and temperatures, forces and flows that lend the rhythms, frequencies, remixes and beats of everyday life within our built environment. While these are values that architects inevitably orchestrate through design processes, they seldom surface in architectural discourses. Typological rethinking, genealogical retracings, ontological projections, environmental interconnectedness, technological sensoriums result in new forms of inhabitation through pedagogical experimentations at SEA.

The question of architecture, the identity of the architect, is constantly under transformation. To ask ‘how much space does architecture occupy’ calls for an interrogation of the place of the discipline in our societal consciousness. At SEA, we maintain the relevance of contemporary architectural practice by reconceptualising the objects/tools we produce to engage and intervene into the society. Within the rubric of Noise Fields, the exhibition Volumes lays out alternative voices, the differential decibels through which forms of practicing space may be possibly presenced. The exhibition embraces the inherent reworkings of the post-pandemic modality of architectural engagement within its curatorial strategy. Viewers are invited to straddle between the digital and the physical while immersing into the volume of student work produced during the last year. 

Poster: Long Questions

VAICA 2 - Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists

VAICA is a public platform that looks closely at artful and critical engagements in video and moving images by Indian contemporary artists. It brings video practitioners of Indian origin from various backgrounds who have found themselves experimenting with the medium. This edition of the VAICA festival, FIELDS OF VISION, brings together 79 artists with 121 video works.

Fields of Vision

Screen spaces define and describe new geographies of inhabitation in contemporary times. ‘Fields of Vision’ presents an array of visual experiments by contemporary video practitioners of Indian origin that expand our imaginative geography through four interpolated fields: art-science, body-desire, real-imagined and hetero-urban. The pluralising of the singular ‘field’ into the multiple ‘fields’ proposes widening of perspectives, multiplying vectors of viewing, and discovering new directions for inhabitation and wandering. 121 videos by 78 artists, distributed into four chapters over four weeks of the VAICA festival will delve closely into charting new coordinates through which videographies rephrase, re-engineer and perhaps puncture our normalised field of vision.


Week 1
Cartographies of Sensation

The first set of videos under ‘Fields of Vision’ attempt to locate the cartographies of sensation – those that attempt to map the coordinates of experience, observation, perception and artistic production. In these mappings, moving images play closely between the dialectics of science and fiction. They become poetries of thought and speculation. Much like the make-up of the cartesian cross-grid, they interweave worlds of science and art – both that relocate the boundaries of awareness of the self and the surroundings. The moving images slow down time, make us pause, repeat and reconsider, or suspend us in limbo towards opening new ways to sense the world. Through such awareness, one may begin to demarcate a space of expanded consciousness.


Week 2
Orbits of Desire

‘Orbits of Desire’ brings together video works that explore subjects of gender, sexuality, relationships and performance that are circumscribed by bodily acts. Body is the medium through which we make memories or perform inner desire. What fragments of time become worthy of preserving, to what extent does one stretch limits of performativity, how do we inhabit memory and what are our limits of retention? These are questions that the videos in this section address. Videos become sites of retention and release and effectively preserve temporal bodies as archives. They allow us to rediscover our desires in orchestrating strategic encounters with time, accumulated into their visual orbits.


Week 3
Peripheries of the Real

This segment puts together video experiments that explore environmental aspects that remain unattended or obviated due to excessive immersion or inadvertent neglect. Such conditions highlight instances of not only parallel reals but also the surreal, hyperreal, para-real or unreal. The digital space today extends our present lives into the netherworld of the virtual. The pandemic inverted humanity’s sense of reality by locking us within our homes or producing the fear of the outside. Absences and presences interchange their roles in our everyday keeping us within the peripheries of the real. The videos here attempt to come to terms with, or even expose us to a sense that field of reality that we encounter seems to be bounded merely by a mythical horizon.


Week 4
Urban Heterotopias

Urban heterotopias make themselves apparent most vividly through videoscapes. These other spaces create their own psycho-geographies within the shared space of the city. The city inevitably is the most charged site for the performance of politics. It is the ground where multiple ideologies dance with each other. What forms of co-habitations and contestations take place within the city? What rhythms do conflicting ideologies produce and how do they negotiate power? The videos in the concluding session closely contemplate upon the urban condition as well as political actions that consistently rework our landscapes of everyday encounters. Can these revelations readdress our equation with the urban space thereby altering our fields of vision?