Tuesday, October 18, 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




Monday, October 10, 2022

The Work of Culture

 






















The Work of Culture

by Gananth Obeyesekere
Symbolic transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology

The Work of Culture is the process whereby symbolic forms existing on the cultural level get created and recreated through the minds of the people. It deals with the formation and transformation of symbolic forms, but it is not a transformation without a subject as in conventional structural analysis. Furthermore, the work of culture is not confined to deep motivation in the Freudian sense. While the symbolic transformation of the images of the unconscious into the public culture is the main focus of [the lectures in the book], I do not confine myself to this exclusive domain...

Thursday, October 06, 2022

Daman Coastline

























This is a Map of Daman coastline highlighting the fast transforming environmental features all the way from Bhilad to Nani Daman Fort, created by Vastavikta Bhagat during our field visit for the Environmental Design Studio during June 2022. 

The premise of the studio was to articulate environmental questions for the emerging consolidation of the 12km long coastline of the Union Territory of Daman along the coat of Arabian Sea that is primarily geared towards serving a middle and upper class tourism market; and thereby articulate architectural responses to soften the impacts due to such hardening of the edge. 

On Stories



Dushyant: (shares a meme) "In the end we all become stories."
Me: (In the end) Only powerful people become stories. The remaining become sea-salt.