First Questions

How were buildings made before the British introduced the orthographic methods of drawing? How did the focus on orthographic drawing and European construction methods shape the thinking and practice of architecture in India? Can construction be thought through ideas beyond permanence and resistance? How do we think of a history of architecture beyond styles? Why should the architect disturb this status quo? What is the value of fiction in architecture? How do we mobilize data meaningfully in architecture? What is the experience of technology? What are the limits of resource extraction? How do we understand and reconfigure digital-material relationships in architecture? In what registers can architects think of space and form? What processes would strengthen acts of meaning making with our environment? What questions must be asked for emerging urbanism? What is research in architecture? Several such inquiries, gathered by academics at the School of Environment & Architecture (SEA) have resulted in the book ‘First Questions’ that provokes spatial practitioners to challenge their equation and role in addressing the built environment. The book marks the completion of first five years of experiments and interrogations at SEA, oriented towards making inroads into these inquiries, as much as generating new ones. The thirteen incisive essays layout a landscape of thoughts that architects, academics and students ought to engage in urgently, and intimately. It is time we asked these first questions.

Parul Gupta / Space; underscore

essay for Parul Gupta's works displayed at Studio reD, Prabhadevi.

Space; underscore

While Newton believed that smaller masses in space are fundamentally attracted into the gravitational “pull” of the heavier ones, Einstein suggests that objects essentially experience a spatial “push” that determines their movement and relative position concerning each other. Parul Gupta’s works are tensioned between the above “push” and “pull” of space, characterized in her experiments with the practice of drawing. In her sensitive perception that is intuitively moved by the silent suggestions of shifting lights, shadows, events and perspectives, Gupta essentially morphs space into a dynamic entity. Through her works, one can consider several scientific as well as perceptual registers of space- time at once, that get translated into drawings, sculptures and site-specific interventions. In doing so, Gupta underscores her works not simply as an aesthetic preoccupation, instead as a fertile field of knowledge.

 

A series of squares set within meticulous grids destabilize our modes of perception. Stable tilts, deviating parallels, unidentical equals and accurate unfits characterize these works. On a deeper gaze, seemingly stable Cartesian space begins to appear warped. Is one cheated into a perceptual labyrinth or has one entered a space of distortion? Gently diverging lines of the substratum and the surface leave one thinking about their interspatial relationships. The solid squares leap out of the paper, the drawings take one deeper into the infinitum of the grid. In this tension, the viewer is challenged on his/her grounds of rationality. 

Gupta’s works index and overlap several spatio-temporal graphs that invite closer investigation. Densities of space created in folding, releasing, splitting, dissecting, fading or strengthening lines within an imagined continuum narrates numerous stories. Are these scores waiting to be sounded into music, or are these barcodes of a number yet to be counted? Are these the unfolded scales of early observatories that were built to map the cartography of the skies; or are these seismographic charts that mark the tectonic shifts to which our everyday gets attuned on ground? Are they streams of microwaves within which we are inevitably swimming or the rhythms of a pulsating organ emanating from within the body? As we consider these questions within the artist’s finely drafted lines, encompassing poetry of mathematics begins to emerge. 

What does a line want to be? Perhaps in Gupta’s practice, this question is inexhaustive. The lines take multifarious forms creating degrees of opacity and translucency, rigidity and movement. Gupta demonstrates that her lines are continually breathing and have an agency of their own. They fold the viewers within forces of space to guide them into gentle action. Her works are orchestrations of line assemblies that do not limit themselves within the bounds of the frame. Instead, they speak to its edges and even bargain to enter from outside or escape from within them. It is here that her serious constructions assume an emancipatory quality of play and find their planes of engagement with the observer.

All images: Parul Gupta.

Structures

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

Listening to Lata

Some of my friends vehemently argue that Lata Mangeshkar became popular only because of the volume of songs that she got to sing. And ofcourse, there must be many, and even legitimate accounts of how she must have monopolised the music market. The more irritating problem to me however, is when people begin to judge someone (as populist) based on whom (here Lata) we listen to. Now, many know that I am into music, that I have learnt it, and also that I can reasonably sing well. When I listen to songs, I mostly listen to them very intently and carefully. Some performances of Lata (along with many others) have left me stunned of her acumen. The effortless manner in which she is able to glide through musical notes, the clever ways in which she plays with the beats, her ingenuity in taking aalaps - sometimes devised on her own that have become the signature of so many songs - are all admirable qualities. All of this, at a time when we didnot have technology where music can be punched, tone can be autocorrected or music and singing is recorded separately.

I often engage myself with covers of songs I like. These are mostly by Lata or Asha, or such other singers from their generation. Mostly, these are to understand the true potentials of an average singer. One often is able to notice in these renditions, the actual limitations one faces - because often, these covers are recorded using very low end, home bound technology. The appreciation of their original singers thus takes full meaning for one realises they were able to do much more in the limited technology back in the day. Further, these are moments which make you realise why precisely you like a particular rendition. I also listen to the male versions of Lata songs that I often end up disliking. (not giving a list here).

By and large, the argument is that we are socially conditioned to listen to Lata Mangeshkar. The questions that must be raised then are as follows: When people go to listen to Lata/Asha/Rafi songs in contemporary concerts, do they listen to the original, or do they listen to a version of the original? Having attend several of such concerts, where halls are full, it is obvious that audiences consume a mere second-hand version of the song, often imitating the voice. What aspect, in such a situation gets consumed? Do the listeners imagine the original Lata singing? Or are they appreciating the reproduction of the songs one has heard through the performer at hand? We come to consider here, that the listener, necessarily listening to the contemporary performer, takes pleasures in the nuances that he/she has registered in his/her own listening of the song - moments through which they make a mental map, or a diagram of the song, or more accurately, a diagram of pleasure within the object of music. These diagrams are difficult to challenge by contemporary musicians.

The shift of music register, or listening practice, from melody to voice texture took place only after 90s, when new assertions through global capital were enabled in India. People began to identify themselves in these new kinds of voice cultures, that shaped new listening cultures. Many old Hindi  songs where dubbed into remixes by newer singers, many of which were not successful. One can see how easily they lose listenership over the original counterparts. Voice casting almost overshadowded any need for melody, with the extended technological aid of autotune and electronic voices. Thus, music could virtually be produced without the need for singers. The first decade of the millennium saw a range of voice casting that created a new value for types of sounds, not necessarily melodies. Yet, these were all more often than not, easily forgotten. I would go on to say that post 1990s, music in Hindi Film Industry also was readjusting to the new instruments and recording techniques that were acquired from the west. One observes that the industry takes time to settle into the earlier melody-oriented music-making in the country. Thus we have very crude experimental music productions, even at the cost of perverse lyrics sometimes.

Even in times such as these, people find themselves going back to the older melodies sung in the simplicity of musical score in the early 60s-90s. In my opinion, one cannot simply relegate this music-listening as a populist act of consumption. And while one listens to Lata, one is equally sensitive of all the developments in music (atleast in the Hindi Film industry). Could then, the recent fetish for introducing and consuming new textures of voices, infact, be considered populist? I have been thinking about what critical frames would one consider in evaluating or appreciating music in the context of listening to songs produced in the Hindi Film industry. A friend recently pointed to me a music analyst who performs across stage shows. It's time I turn back to her and hunt this person down!

Wadiyar Centre for Architecture

As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice / MMB

As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice / MMB

published in Art India Vol. 23 / Issue 3

--

Hear, Hear

From the expressions of labourers to the scripts of queer phone conversations, a group show brings together diverse marginalised voices. Anuj Daga listens carefully.



At the outset, the curatorial endeavour of the show As it rises into the air: Listening in Practice from the 21st of August to the 5th of October at the Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, seemed like a rehearsal in the reverse-invocation of Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, where Spivak raises questions on the ways in which we investigate another culture and the ethics of interpreting and representing the other. Curated by Berlin-based Juana Awad and Mumbai-based Zeenat Nagree, the exhibition brings together 13 international and Indian artists whose works refer to various kinds of marginality like colour, class, caste and sexuality. Several artistic practitioners have engaged with under-represented and marginal voices as material for art over the last two decades. In their gentle repositioning of the project within the domain of the listened rather than the spoken, the curators of the present show hoped to invite reflection on the practice of representation wherein the critical gaze is turned to the observer, rather than the observed.

Mumbai-based artist Amol Patil presents archival audio clips of his father’s play who was a mill worker by day and a playwright by night. By methods of superimposition, re-recording and editing the voices on measured lengths of the magnetic audio tape, also originally used by his father, Patil produces a sound that seems to index the environment of labour, as well as the intimation of its theatrical experiments. This work is complimented by Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang whose adjacently placed film Music While We Work documents along with the help of its workers, the sounds of sugar factory in her hometown Huwei. Wang principally stages sound as the collective memory of the labour force’s most significant experience in these closed down factories. Through these installations, both projects push the observer to listen to the experience of class as much as the post-productive quotidian lives of the mill-workers – one imagined in the play-scripts and the other compulsively remembered as music.

Sandeep Kuriakose’s Woh bhi line ka tha transcribes queer phone conversations into an uninterrupted singular script printed on a legal paper, left to be picked up and read by the viewer. The work coaxes the reader to be a voyeuristic listener although privileges the English reader in its decision to transcribe Hindi conversations (along with the English) into the Latin alphabet. Natasha A. Kelly from Germany and Karan Shrestha from India/Nepal sensitize us to the documentary voice of the emotionally or physically suppressed that we customarily attend to in ethnographic histories. Kelly draws our attention to the verbalized experiences of people of colour in Germany whereas Shrestha records the voices of the displaced from the Chitwan National Park in Nepal. In hearing these two works, one wonders if the artist also becomes the mediator of catharsis in one’s role as a patient listener.

Noise composer Raven Chacon’s sound installation remains the most riveting inclusion. Scores of music laid out on standees set a ghost-like stage for a concert that one witnesses on a screen. A disciplined row of gun-shooters fire bullets to the meters and scales of the composition. Although hearing the sonic gunshots on screen dampens the potential experience of the live performance, one can only imagine the lyrical brutality of listening to Chacon’s work in person, simultaneously inversing the notion of both firing and music. Chacon’s work fundamentally and poignantly addresses the questions raised in the curators’ schema. It ‘attacks’ our foundations of listening as practice – physically as well as symbolically.

The question of the ‘listened’ seemingly keeps slipping in the experience of the show, for it is hurdled by the compulsive indulgence in the visual (for an alien viewer), which also includes the read, the language, video or the installation (all functions of the eye). The limits of listening are thus metaphorically extended to mean paying careful attention to the ‘object’ at hand, or even speaking to one’s own silences. A counsellor or psychologist’s principal practice, inarguably, is to listen. The curation brings together multiple dimensions of the artist as a listener, and turns him or her into a psychologist of the self. However, one wonders if the curation imagines listening as a value-neutral act?

It is here that we come to interrogate listening as a possible mode of accumulating power. After all, speech is the material of listening. How does the listener draw power? How does the practice of listening constitute power? To be sure, the listener is not a body without agency, rather the centre of power in a discussion. What then, are the ideological and political underpinnings and pursuits of listening? How do we delineate the ethical-moral codes for the practice of listening? Do the speaking individuals objectify themselves in being listened? Such questions bring us to consider if the speaking body has any real agency, or is it only apparent? However, if we agree that voicing is an important act, then it is listening that enables speech. It is the presence of another body that mediates speech. Listening necessarily means to engage, empathize and think with the speaker. It demands attention and participation in meaning-making. Listening may consciously refrain from inviting any intervention during the act of speech. It thus offers a contemplative space where decisions are delayed and negotiations are sustained. Listening capacitates and prolongs the holding of thought just as it rises into the air.

Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary

Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary

published in Art India, December 2019

--

Playing with Light

Through spray-painted sheets, folded foils, marble stones and a nylon fishing net sculpture, Rana Begum explores the interaction between space, form and colour, points out Anuj Daga.


One will be misled if one is merely taken over by the forms that are mounted neatly on gallery surfaces by the Bangladeshi-British artist Rana Begum at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, between the 19th of September and the 2nd of November. The large spray-painted sheets, folded coloured foils, terraneous jesmonite blocks, rounded marble stones and a fishing net displayed within the gallery are, in fact, quiet dialogues around colour and light. Rana Begum seems to be preoccupied with questions of interaction between shape, space and colour: how does light sculpt forms, what are the ways in which light can colour space, how do we wear the colour reflected off material surfaces, how do colours contour space? The methodical dismantling of colours that Rana employs in her construction of artworks, and its subsequent perception by the viewer opens a phenomenological field within which several such questions hallucinate much like her coloured spray-prints.

Palm-sized leaves of aluminium foil shimmer and mirror colour off their soft coat of paint into their warped micro-surfaces. They create a glow of tinted air within their contoured pockets. The linear grids, however, are the most mysterious lines on the foil surface. One wonders how these Cartesian lines get cast on the undulating surface of the foil? How could one possibly maintain the ordered nature of grids while still folding up the foil into a warped terrain? Rana collapses the smooth and the rough, the linear and the crooked, or even the opaque and the shiny onto each other. In doing so, she conceptually superimposes meridians of the flat cartographic map, the three-dimensional terrain and its subsequent interplay with light while producing a commentary on the experience of colour in space. As one continues to gaze through the works, the saturated hues within the work begin to solidify in the mind as the material of art.

The jesmonite cast works seem to be the solid counterparts of the thin folded foils, those that maintain their conversations with colour – now, bright and liberated. Each mounted contour is read in a distinct dominant colour, as if a de-layered GIS (Geographical Information System) map, isolated into its individual data terrain! When seen thus, the scaled landscapes begin to gesture about vegetation with theirseasonal colours of the fall and the spring. The polished marble pieces, all sets of different colours of the stone, reflect light crisply. They offer opportunities to consider the different colours in which light solidifies into stones. Each table of smoothened stones presents a family of sedimented saturations. Could these possibly have been excavated from one of the above representational sites?

In another section, a canopy of a fishing net spray-painted with rainbow colours splits each colour into thin threads. As one’s eyes traverse through the overlaps of these coloured threads in space, intermediate colours begin to appear. The blending of hues and their perception thereof allude to the dynamic patterns of spray-painted colour sheets. The space between the tautly held folds of the net diffract rays in feather-like delicacy. Further, the net casts shadows that index densities of these colorations on the ground. The dismantling of colour and its reconstitution in space is a characteristic experience of this gentle installation. Placed diametrically across a clear view of the Arabian sea within the gallery, the object begins to speak to the site, albeit in new ways.

Rana’s works clearly extract light and colour (essentially a function of light itself) as an experiential artefact. Primarily working through simple ideas and employing techniques like diffraction, diffusion, reflection and dispersion of light, one understands the pursuit of discovering a new experience in her experiments. Unlike the scientist, Rana works with an artful precision in order to create affective experiences that allow us to converse with light in a playful, childlike manner. It brings forth on canvas the psychedelic rendering of colours we often indulge in and perceive while wilfully closing our eyes. The sheer pleasure and mystery of such hallucinations find a lyrical documentation in Rana’s endeavour. Yet, her work is not divorced from form. Rather than reading sciography as a function of the object, Rana successfully inverts this relationship wherein crafting light defines her forms. This is the principal site of investigation that her works unpack for an artistic reconsideration.

Just Give Me Some Space: Panel Discussion

Transcript of the Panel Discussion organized at Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture, on the inauguration of 'Just Give me Some Space' authored by architect Suha Khopatkar. The discussion opens up ways of building empathies in academic practice, specially between teachers and students in an architecture school. The discussants include Vandana Ranjitsinh, Rohan Shivkumar, Nisha Nair, Suha Khopatkar, and Anuj Daga (moderator).

published in Indian Architect & Builder, November 2019.

Read full article with illustrations here.

Delhi

This time when I visited Delhi, a friend explained me the broad structuring of Delhi and it's suburbs. Delhi has grown radiating in different suburbs, those that include Noida, Greater Noida, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ghaziabad and Sonipat to consider the key ones. Noida, I came to know is the abbreviation of New Okhla Industrial Development Authority. When one goes to Noida, a totally new landscape, quite different from Delhi's colonies and bungalows dawns. The tyranny of apartment blocks walling one's vision are arranged into societies and townships. The other lineup is the glitzy IT complexes which I had never seen so blatantly while moving in the main city before. This is not to say that the new suburbs are bad. They have clean air, less density and lot of free space...those that the typical corporate-jib inhabitants idealize. Those whose idea of cultural engagement is largely the mall and the multiplex on a weekend. 

Yet, Delhi felt much easier to move through the metro, autos and buses. Inspite of all the deathly news of the toxic air, I saved myself without the mask. This time was also the first when I used Delhi's buses, and they were extremely convenient and cheap. I haven't really experienced choking roads in Delhi. To me, it has always been a city of wide roads, laid out concentrically, that doesn restrict movement just into a single spine like in Mumbai. The overlapping lines of Delhi metro make it quite complex and I feel it had been resolved quite well. Besides, the infrastructures seemed quite spacious as compared to Mumbai where people literally don't have space to walk on foot over bridges or train stations. Perhaps because Delhi simply has the land to spread, it felt more comfortable and convenient.

As a city of "colonies", Delhi has always fascinated me. The housing colonies are like hives with several entrances and internal gates that can bring varying degrees of control. I have always wanted to understand their layouts and how they become/merge in the public urban domain. Such a complexity of form disappeared in Gurgaon and Noida that had clear cut sectors with houses typically addressed with plot numbers. The metro in these suburbs begins to traverse larger distances between individual stations. The landscape begins to feel stretched... perhaps this is what we understand as sprawl. 

Last but not the least, I spend some really intimate moments with close friends and acquaintances in the city. This is also what made the entire trip memorable as compared to others. This time I felt a distinct warmth that the city offered to me and, at once I thought, what if I was a resident of this very City. Perhaps it is the growing familiarity with a place that coaxes us to consider such a possibility. Inspite of my continuous hopping in the city from one end to the other, glibly over public transportation or Uber/ola's, I believe I could make some worthwhile conversation with people in an otherwise intimidating place. In this view, the city allowed me to tame it. I have always believed that people in Delhi, unlike Mumbai, have had the time to sit and stare, or even talk. Mumbai is a city which perpetually keeps you vary of it's next slipping timetable. Perhaps I saved myself of it in Delhi being a visitor! Still, Delhi, for now, seemed more livable than Mumbai.