New Year - Art in the age of Precarity

Inspired from the wall text installation of Shilpi Rajan's show curated by Aazhi Archives at the Uru Art Harbour in Mattancherry, Fort Kochi, this graphic was developed to suggest foraying our entry into a new year of precarity. 

As Dhruv tried to install the vinyl text onto the freshly dried white painted wall of the recently acquired space of Uru Art Harbour, the surface and the text behaved rather unruly producing an even geography of pasts and presents. Sitting uncomfortably, each layer seemed equally precarious, struggling to exist and yet not. 

The next morning, Dhruv and his team came up with a unique way to repair the introduction wall text. The older letters were removed, the wall was repainted, the vinyl text was reprinted. Yet, the problem persisted. This time, they printed out missing parts of the text on white paper and patched it up onto the wall with glue. The recalcitrant moisture in the walls, the peeling paint and the rough surface - all struggled to support each other. Could this be what we might understand as the essential difficulty of co-existence?

The resultant aesthetic, probably resonant with Shilpi's own trajectory, played a persistent poetry of fracture. Simultaneously suggesting a fracture of language, art and the world, this emergent expression of the wall text framed a metaphorical prelude to the show, that itself was placed in a broader thematic of art in the age of precarity.

With appendages, supplements, affixtures, work still goes on. Yet, this is not to valorize precarity of infrastructure or delay as design. This is to highlight how fugitive feelings of materials can produce fractures that cannot be mended easily, and perhaps there are longer histories that need to be addressed while curating for art in the age of precarity.

Look at the images of Shilpi Rajan's show here.

Architectural Practice In India: A Millennial Archaeology

monsoon 2025-26

At the threshold of the first quarter of the millennium, which also marks a generation since India’s economic liberalization, architectural practice in India is ripe for a critical re-evaluation. In this period, the country has gradually, yet starkly shifted from a socialist framework to a neoliberal state, where developmental politics has ramified architectural production into new directions and logics. Existing scholarship on the built environment in India has often focused narrowly on the aesthetics of form, the evolving identity of the architect, or the reception of modernism as inherited from the West. Architectural discourse has largely taken one of two paths: either documenting work deemed academically significant, or framing emerging practices in terms of identity—often measured against binaries such as modern versus indigenous/vernacular. Such approaches tend to posit the architect as a servant of academic canons or fixed ideals.

Architectural practice on the ground, as it appears now, is far more complex - one that exhibits reorientation of spatial ideals and values to reflect a rapidly evolving society increasingly shaped by media, consumerism, and aspirations of globalisation. Once trained architects step into the field, the idealism of modernism is quickly refracted through geopolitical urgencies and the pragmatic demands of practice. What is often overlooked is the inherent political exigency that compels practice to adapt—making the operations and expressions of architecture more malleable and responsive to emerging needs of the market - in its widest extensions. In such contexts, architects evolve new formats, languages, agencies, and strategies to negotiate their professional knowledge to remain relevant within the real-world demands of building reinterpreting spatial briefs through the vocabularies of capital, conservation, environment, real estate, and more.

‘Architectural Practice in India: A Millennial Archaeology’ seeks to examine how architectural practice in India has developed over the last three decades within the framework of the millennial shift in its political economy. What forces—of power, ambition, and institutional pressure—have shaped architectural production during this period and how does it reorganise the delivery of the built environment? What aspects of practice gain currency in the emerging market and how does the professional architect find reconciliations and directions in addressing these. In excavating these variegated forms of practice that shape the unevenness of our built landscape today, these discussions aim to explore tendencies such as the rise of managerial approach, the renewed focus on environmental and heritage concerns, the emergence of artisanal and communitarian agendas, the urgency of urbanistic thinking, response to media and the integration of computational and digital thinking that come to constitute distinct, yet composite strands of spatial practice today.

The new cycle of SEA City Conversations is conceived as a year-long series of panel discussions featuring architects and spatial commentators, whose own practices have decisively responded to the millennial shifts in the region, by means of slipping, fitting or pushing the envelopes of conventional formats of practice. Methodologically, the series will draw upon the professional biographies of practitioners from across the city whose trajectories have remained representatively pivotal in bringing and operating in such changing dynamics of practice. Through reflexive interrogation and collective debate over the upcoming year, the programme imagines to present itself as an open course for the city, and invite the public to participate in a collective architecture history-writing exercise that seeks to critically engage with the evolving realities of contemporary architecture in India.

Everyday Reinventions

Hyderabad, 2017

 

Notes on Play

The Beauty of Unwanted Things

The Spectacle of Demolition

 

Architectural Sketches

The Ephemeral Skywalk Museum

Every morning, I pass by the Borivali West Sky-walk and there are versions of it that I observe, in different facets, occupancies, affordances and experiences. Earlier I have thought of sky-walk as a space of infrastructure, enterprise, landscape, home; and this time, it emerged to me as a museum. 

With the rise in construction activity within the city given the beautification under the G20 summit, concrete dust, along with seasonal dust is rampant in the air. (Mumbai's air has recently been announced as one of the most polluted as compared to other cities in India; many people are suffering respiratory problems). 

As we approach the summer after the festival of Holi, the wind becomes dry and carries fine particles of soil, sand, dust and cement. This gets settled onto the polycarbonate vision barriers installed on both sides of the sky-walk. As they wait to be cleared, by the corporation officials or the eventual rain, the thin layer of dust becomes a canvas for several passers by to instinctively sweep messages and patterns off their finger. Thus, the dust laden polycarbonate panels are filled with messages, drawings, patterns, of all kinds, becoming a soft canvas of/for the city.

In Shanghai, I had once observed an old man with a bucket of water and a large brush who painted poetry on the pathway of a public garden as an evening ritual. The yet-lukewarm stone of the garden held the liquid poetry for a little while until it evaporated into the air. The sheer sublimity of this performance triggered several thoughts in my mind - the economy of material, the public nature of the setting, the performance of poetry in space, the silence and surprise, the poise of paint and immediacy of the message, the body and the brush, the warmth and wetness - making it a profound work of art. 

The dust boards here in Mumbai then, are a perfect solution to the high intensity transitory demand for communication in public space. They are temporary, light, low maintenance and ephemeral in a manner that not only serves purpose, but also are soft non-intrusive canvases that quietly assist you as you traverse through the sky-walk. Further, these now-information boards are completely public, free and open canvases for leaving messages without a cost. They allow for entrepreneurial information, moral messaging, missed connections, lost loves in combination with poetry, profanity, doodles or drawings that people make while waiting in the city. More importantly, they become spaces of self expression in the city. 

Sophie Blackall, the Australian-American illustrator, in her work 'Missed Connections' accesses the archive of what-if love stories left by strangers whose eyes may or may not have met while transacting through the city, over internet platforms like Craigslist. Blackall summarises:

"Every day hundreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their messages have the lifespan of a butterfly. I’m trying to pin a few of them down.”

It is the aspect of pinning down a butterfly-message, and imagining its full life, that this post ought to do. The messages left on the dust-canvases of this suburban skywalk in Mumbai may then be a physical counterpart of the virtual notes on the internet portals, that Blackall illustrates so vividly. For the passer by, the sky-walk opens up as an archive of the city's desires. In its particular setting, where we encounter the dust-boards at the eye-level swiped with finger strokes, the sky-walk turns into no less than a museum displaying a long reel of urban graffiti - one that is going to disappear or extend or even overwritten without permission or prior notice, and this with no offence or promise to the author. 

I hope the authorities never find this out, and allow for this play to remain on the surfaces of the sky-walk - as a marker of dust, desire and democracy that cultural spaces ought to attend with full attention.