Bharatesh GD at Fulcrum

 

Ramesh Nithiyendran at Jhaveri Contemporary

still (in parenthesis)

a note on exhibition of works by Prabodh Parikh

Parentheses are punctuation marks invented to denote supplemental, secondary or sidelined information in language and logic. Much of this supplemental information actually contains the “stuff” of life - that we try to make meaning of. Foregrounding these marginal gestures, this exhibition brackets a few sets of visual experiments by Prabodh Parikh crystallizing the inquisitive restlessness of a mind nourished amidst a fertile environment of artists, philosophers, poets, writers and architects over the last five decades. Working with lines and colour, mediums dry and wet, on canvases small and large, the artist generates uneven geographies of the mind within which quiet figures appear gently reposed. One sees the desire to anchor the anxiety of emergent formlessness of the drawn matter by discreet anthropomorphic punctuations that allude them as bodies or movements, made legible to the gestaltic eye. This compulsion to form an image within abstraction demonstrates the struggle to resolve (and yet remain with) the chaos of everyday life. 

The body in these abstractions traverse several states of existence - from elemental to elaborate. While loosely (dis)entangled lines sometimes themselves come together in entropic densities, at other times they sit quietly onto noisy backgrounds. Figures once alone/unattended slowly morph and coalesce into allied bodies, at other times, their communality awaits sublimation within the canvas. Through these  subtle distinctions and dissolutions, they invite the viewer into subtle acts of meditation. The drawings then are quiet interruptions, still in parentheses, that must be accommodated amid the rhythmic  choreography of a routined experience. These are conscious and subconscious states of being that map the  journey of the individual to belong to the community, and return back only to become an individual. What shapes does such travel morph us into?

The placement of a parenthesis can significantly alter the meaning of a proposition, revealing how peripheral thought comes to silently shape the centre. Parentheses hold implications, intonations, inflections, and the excesses of meaning without which the primary content is susceptible to lose its context. We often bracket aspects that are integral to life yet remain unspoken, treating them as provisional - information  that is essential but suspended. Having moved from doodles on the margins to drawings on canvases, the works in this exhibition suggest what is ostensibly marginal may be constitutive, and that meaning resides as much in the bracketed aside as in the main text. They preserve inner ideas as addenda, safeguarding what cannot be fully absorbed into the linear flow of literature or life. To engage with such subtleties requires not only seeing them with the inner eye, but learning to remain with them: the challenge is to be there, still.

Tyeb Mehta's retrospective at Mumbai Art Fair 2025

Capitalist Landscape vs Communist Landscape

Photos above are of Mumbai and Kozhikode.

The tag 'AI generated content' tag in two of them refers to the content-aware tool used to remove and patch up the wings of the airplane interrupting the small top right corners of the respective photographs. 

Matrix of Spatial Concepts / Architectural Representation Studio

 

In 2019, the focus of the second semester Architectural Representation studio at SEA was to introduce hybrid drawing, i.e blending hand-drawing and digital techniques of image making. Rather than maintaining it as a passive skill-building studio, our attempt was to push students to find their own ways of creating an imagery for a given provocation. 

Two aspects were mobilized simultaneously: 

1. Basic introduction to key softwares (AutoCAD, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign and Google Sketchup) 

2. A provocation, where each student was asked to select from a matrix of words, resulting in a phrase that would become their brief for representation. 

The matrix for the provocation is as shown above. Students were asked to pick one word from each column to arrive at their "brief". Individual selections from the columns of the table resulted into unexpected, but imaginative propositions like: “Room of crowded ghosts” or “Pavilion above dark trees”. Through referencing artists, architects and graphic designers, the studio worked out possibilities of visually representing each of the phrases, in order to open up image-making in architectural representation as an important tool towards argumentation, evocation and imagination of space.

Investigative thoughts on translating music into space

The translation of music into architecture is still an obscure process and one may consider and observe many methods for it. However, firstly, I must explicate the difference between sound and music. The difference between sound and music can be considered analogous to that between caves and rock cut architecture. Essentially, music is structured sound - sound that is bound into the framework of melody, rhythm and beats. Music is a more complex animal than sound to be translated into architecture. When it comes to being transformed into space, architects often tend to convert any medium or experience into visuals so that it can be harnessed into a language of architecture. However, what system do you choose to convert sound or music into visuals! It is one thing to produce music or sound through established conventions of written visual notations. And it is arguable, since firstly, these are just conventions, and secondly, not all cultures have such developed systems (read visual systems) for recording, passing on and performing music. In traditional and most cases, particularly in the electronic and more so the digital era, the frequency bar graph of the musical records is taken as a beginning point.

The frequency bar graph of any music system displays a graph of the different aspects of music on a two dimensional Cartesian grid where the amount of frequencies of different tones are measured. While this can be an empirical measure of sound, the experience of the entirety of music is certainly not so isolated. That means, we do not experience music in its constituent individual tones, rather it is a holistic multidimensional one; where the streams of rounds create a complete environment affecting one physical as well as emotional senses at the same time. Thus using the frequency bar graphs of soundscapes that appear on digital screens offer an accurate measure of tones, but don't give us an accurate method or measure of experience. I therefore find it quite redundant as a tool to use in order to make something tangible from music into architecture.

The way in which music translates into space needs to be investigated through the framework of the musician. A musician, - a vocalist, instrumentalist or any such virtuoso is consciously striking specific chords in order to create a space in the mind of his / her audience, or creating a particular kind of environment for the listener. In this, he / she is also perceiving certain qualities of the environment, in quite an abstract fashion, and for his own practice of making music for the audience. In this, The musician has quite subconsciously articulated a method to work out space into music and further deploy it too. This particular method needs to be learnt by the architect.

In quite direct terms, music has the obvious highs and lows, the adjectives of three dimensional space that come to define certain characteristics of music. Such adjectives offer the most ready means for music to be interpreted as spatial. In terms of a phenomenological experience for the performer, it means (For a vocalist) Singing in head voice for higher note, while from the belly for a lower note. The high and lows in the standard upright position & balance of the body then, are quite literally, but also pragmatically up and down in the body respectively. In terms / for the listener, it either creates a mood of excitement, charging up the body to swing and more with the performer or make oneself sombre, melancholic through the low notes. There is ample theory on how moods are actually created by a selection of sharp and flat notes (for Indian classical music) and then through movements of through notes, in both, Indian and Western Classical music. One thing, that has to be rather. specified in that while curtain association with certain kinds of music or forces are already established for us in both the above music systems, I constantly like to challenge them in terms of feeling what it actually does to me as against the expected or prescribed effect. However, this can also be a factor that may be left up to the subjectivity of the listener. For example, the association of stately Western classical music or Baroque music is a matter of association, or I wonder if one genuinely can understand It to belong only to that context. Similarly certain ragas sung in certain time periods may purely be a historic experience.

In our detached, isolated and mobile environment that we listen to music today, one wonders how these historic associations work themselves out. In history, listening to music (and therefore the production to space) must certainly not have been an individualistic affair. Then comes the idea of volume, depths and perspective - all that closely relate to architecture and space there characteristics are definitely more about technique of using notes.

The question finally is, what essentially do we represent when we are understanding music in order to translate into architecture? Is it the literal redistribution of particles that are visible on digital pads, is it the bar sheet on which notations for music are written? Or is it the rhythmic changes in tones and melodies through subjective experiences that are shown on paper? In all three, the understanding of music is merely visual. But what does it mean for architecture? Do we then assume that in architecture, the experience of music can only be usual? Or is there a way to actually create a space which induces a musical feeling?

 

These are incomplete ongoing long term thoughts.

Four Learnings from Gautam Bhan

Gautam Bhan is one of the foremost academics advocating how environments in the Global South need their own theory. Over the last two years, I have had the opportunity of dabbling into a lot of discussion on knowledge production within the Global south, as well as the urge to decolonise education in this region. In my effort to give meaning to what "decolonise" means in academia, and how does one think of performing it, I indulged myself in Bhan's talks, from one of which, I got some very tangible ideas for academic practice. Here they are:

The ability to translate

Academics are not able to translate their language in different scenarios/situations and therefore they feel silenced. Academics speak in largely academic situations/settings because they are almost sure that it is (going to be) the space from where the validation of their language comes from, and thus are trapped in the "seduction of the academia"

Automatic Modernity

Bhan points out how the project of modernism gives an automatic direction to aspiration - and to aspire has to come to mean to be modern. This conceptual relationship between modernity (read modernity coming from the West) and the desire for progress and the engine of aspiration needs to be challenged. That is the culture work academics have to collectively undertake, Bhan suggests.

On Insularity of Academic Voice

Bhan says that no one stops academics from writing, intervening and performing in domains outside of academia. Therefore, academics cannot afford to stay within the bubble of knowledge production of academia and lament that the world outside is not listening to them. The must actively find audiences and write in their language to make their knowledge and findings about the world more accessible.

On Theory from the North

Bhan says that we need to "particularize" Northern theory - meaning, theory coming from the north is not universal theory, and that it must be assigned a status that it is a theory of that place - and therefore, it cannot be "the" way of doing/thinking things everywhere, rather, "a" way in which things happen somewhere, and therefore all ways of doing things hold value and knowledge because they are inherently embedded in certain values of a place.

On Existentialism

 एक गोष्ट

"मी जन्माला आलो नसतो तर किती बरं झालं असतं," ब्राह्मण म्हणाला.

"का रे, बाबा?" मी विचारले.

"कारण," तो म्हणाला, "गेली चाळीस वर्ष मी अध्ययन करतो आहे आणि मला वाटतं, हा सर्व काळ फुकट गेला. मी जड द्रव्यातून बनलो हे खरं; पण विचार कोठून निर्माण होतात याविषयी मी अद्यापही अज्ञानी आहे. मला हेही समजत नाही की, माझं आकलन माझ्या चालण्यासारखी वा माझ्या पचनक्रियेसारखी सहज प्रेरणा आहे, का मी हातानं एखादी वस्तू धरतो तसा डोक्यानं विचार पकडतो... मी खूप बोलतो, पण ते संपल्यावर मी जे बोललो त्याची मलाच लाज वाटते."

त्याच दिवशी त्या ब्राह्मणाजवळच राहणाऱ्या एका वृद्ध बाईशी माझं बोलणं झाले. मी तिला विचारलं, "तुझा आत्मा म्हणजे काय आहे? आणि ते तुला माहीत नसेल तर त्याचं तुला दुःख होत नाही?" तिला मी काय म्हणतोय हेच मुळी कळलं नाही. तिने आयुष्यात क्षणभरसुद्धा भल्या ब्राह्मणाला छळणाऱ्या गोष्टींचा विचार केला नव्हता. तिची विष्णूच्या अवतारांवर श्रद्धा होती आणि गंगाजलात एकदा स्नान करायला मिळालं, तर जन्माचं सार्थक झालं यावर तिचा विश्वास होता. तिच्या सुखी, समाधानी वृत्तीनं प्रभावित होऊन मी तत्त्वज्ञानी ब्राह्मणाला म्हटलं, “तुझ्याजवळच एक वृद्ध बाई कसलाही गहन विचार करीत नाही आणि सुखासमाधानानं जगते आहे, याची तुला लाज नाही वाटत?"

"तू बरोबर आहेस," ब्राह्मण म्हणाला, "हजार वेळा मी स्वतःला सांगितलं की माझ्या शेजाऱ्याप्रमाणे मी अज्ञानात राहिलो तर सुखानं जगेन; तरी पण तशा सुखाची मला इच्छा होत नाही."

ब्राह्मणाच्या उत्तरानं कशापेक्षाही मी अधिक प्रभावित झालो.

- व्हॉल्टेअर

Translation / English

An Anecdote

"How better would it have been had I not been born," Brahmin said.

"Why do you say that?" I asked.

"Because," he said, "for the past forty years I have been studying and all this while has been wasted. The fact that I am made out of a solid material, but I am still unaware about where thoughts are created. I do not even understand if my analysis is as involuntary as my walking or the process of digestion, or whether I hold ideas knowingly like I hold something consciously in my hands ... I speak a lot, but I myself feel embarrassed of what I have said eventually."

On the same day, I got a chance to speak to an old woman who used to live near that Brahmin. I asked her, "What is your soul? And if you do not know what it is, does it not trouble you?" She did not seem to understand what I was even saying. She had not thought even for a fraction of her life about things that may be bothering a Brahmin. She had faith in the incarnations of Vishnu and believed that if she could bathe in the waters of the Ganges once, her life would be worthwhile. Impressed by her happy, contented attitude, I said to the philosophical Brahmin, "Aren't you ashamed that there is an old woman next to you who doesn't think deeply and lives happily?"

"You are right," said the Brahmin, "a thousand times I have told myself that if I remained in ignorance like my neighbor, I would live happily; yet I do not desire such happiness."

I was more impressed by the Brahmin's answer than anything else.

- Voltaire

on Loneliness

Read on Monophobia