Friday, January 05, 2018

Kochi Biennale 2016 Favourites

Apologies for
1. Delayed Post
2. Bad photographs
3. No annotations
4. No explanations
5. Limited works

There was just so much to see at the Kochi Biennale 2016, and here's what I could mange to shoot with my scratchy phone camera and 10-year old dying Sony Cybershot. I realized later, immediately, that I needed to get both - my phone and camera fixed! Nevertheless, just for record, here are some works that moved me:















Thursday, January 04, 2018

Constructs

I have been fascinated for long in the parapharnelia that are used to bring up buildings: Structures that emerge before those that we come to inhabit. A completely different series of bodies occupy it before us, quite differently than us. Giving the appearances of the infrastructures of very buildings, these are however only temporary, and come together in new configurations all the time depending on site conditions. Such built envelopes enable a building to finally take shape. They are transparent, porous, minimal, elegant, functional and crisp. Often, the buildings that they are built for fail to imbibe these characterists - becoming closed, heavy, cumbersome and frivilous. 

We read them as lines - those that provide datum to perceiving the incomplete monster. Somehow, the scaffold is always complete, irrespective of the growing body behind. It scales the structure, offers a metric, graphs the canvas and inscribes the body of labour within. The strategy of the scaffold as the building is used in the city during several occasions including festivals, rallies, exhibitions, and so on. Yet, so much of it fails to register itself as building. If only one could reverse the process where buildings could dismantle themselves to leave behind the scaffold for us to inhabit; an architecture that becomes in the erasure of the other. What geometries do we employ to realize such space? How do we imagine this process?
















Friday, December 01, 2017

Manjunath at SEA

You might not hear an engineer talk so poetically! Manjunath spoke of structures of banana leaves, branches, folding slabs, ornament, weaving, and expressing nature as forces. Interestingly, Manjunath has worked on projects that I have always (and we all have always) enjoyed as structures. He has worked with the architects we have been looking up to in India!

Here are some of his anecdotes from the lecture that keep you thinking of how beautifully structure can be thought about as life:

"Different forms of structures in nature should be used to create new languages."

"I like to express the forces...as jewellery, as delicate ornamentation of the building."

"The strain is always taken by the engineer, so I have shown it on the top."

"When we work with a good architect, the gift we give is always a nice 'detail'."

"Craft is beyond engineering."

"Gravity is the best adhesive [in structures]."

"Gravity is the hidden geometry of space. We have to learn from gravity and see what are the different forms it takes."

"If you are an engineer, you cannot craft."
(Meaning, if you have become a engineer merely by degree, you cannot craft. If you are not crafting, you are not engineering)

Nothing is more exciting than a lecture that brings a smile to your face and tickles your mind long after it's over. SEA City has had a good lecture after a really long time!

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Unfortunately I have gotten so busy that there is no way I can write any longer posts...I have been learning, thinking and there is no more space to sit silently and write... nevertheless, perhaps the posts now on shall take a new turn?

Friday, October 20, 2017

Second Year Architectural Design 2017

I would begin to say that we culminated our Third Semester (2017) Architectural Design studio in quite a crescendo. All students had a reasonable amount of work in terms of drawings and models for fairly fleshed out schemes. Given that this was their first exercise in building-making, the final result was quite satisfying. The students seemed tired, but content - for they were able to see the promise in the work and realise their own potential. I have begun to believe that it is important for students to see well-finished final product - it note only gives them a sense of completion but also inspires them to evaluate themselves better, or even recalibrate their process strategies in subsequent projects.

If I was to however look at the studio from the pedagogic perspective (and not from the students' view), many other questions begin to emerge - a lot of which I keep aside which would otherwise interfere when conducting the studio. Recently, for example, Prasad asked the faculty at SEA to weigh the output of their modules against the objectives that were set for the individual studios. This question often gets (re)visited during the final reviews when you have to frame the module engagement to external jurors for a fair evaluation, or even reflect upon how successful the project was. Often, one realises that the objectives set for the studio did not really become the points of addressal for most design discussions with students. Rather, with varying intellectual and vocational potentials, the issues that we need to tackle for a given glass invariably have to be realigned.

With second year design modules at SEA, I have never felt a sense of meeting pedagogical expectations. The projects are often framed through objectives that are far too out of the reach of students to even engage at their level of understanding. In my opinion, they are forcefully placed in the realm of "city" and "institution". For example, our objective for the third semester Architectural Design is that to deal with the "type" and the "institution". To be sure, the concepts of "type" and "institution" can be intervened only once one has a clear understanding of what they mean, and how they operate. The idea of a "building type" or "diagram", we noted in our History/Theory module, can be approached in many ways - both formal and programmatic. Its explication can happen through multiple theoretical frames. In the third semester, just the second year of their architectural studies, students are still familiarising themselves to the variety of architectural examples across the world, studying how spaces have been folded in across history. They are also beginning to merely understand and attune themselves to theoretical frameworks through which one can approach the appreciation and designing of architectural forms. What should be the optimum expectation from a student of architecture during this stage?

In the present exercise, we realised that students were still working towards improving their skills of two and three dimensional representations. It is often argued that most architecture institutes lay overemphasis on skill, in the process of which they lose out on the exploratory inventiveness of students' own ways of seeing and thereby representing the world. this process, however, is fairly dialectical. I have to confess, that as architects teaching a design studio, the visual language we best understand is that of orthography - one which generates for us technical drawings of the visualisation of the building. When students don't fall in place with orthographic representations, a subversive aversion to discussion gets built up in the studio due to amplified miscommunications, and the focus shifts from teaching design to representation.

Most ideas about resolution, detail, articulation or structure actually belong to the realm of representation. Think about it - the obsession of alignments, following grids, maintaining order, or balancing rhythm all occur primarily in the visual space. In other words, much of these aspects that control the aesthetics of a building are the prime prerogative of the design studio. There is immense denial within architectural studio on the prerogative of aesthetics. When we are critiquing students on their work, we are often trying to bring their ideas into an aesthetic order. In the present studio, we hardly discussed with them the notion of type, or the institution. The discussion was always veered towards how the building could be composed, or ordered more correctly. Most of our design methods, thus, are processes to codify a certain aesthetic.

Often when teaching, you realise that the student is not even prepared to meet the first objective. So you beginning from the beginning. Further, teaching strategies change with every student depending upon the direction in which they need attention. In my observation, students arrive an the studio objective without necessarily engaging with the questions set out for them. They are not talking to the mentor on the terms of 'type' or 'institution', rather, often merely to be able to take the next step in their design process. Thus, students may only realise the objective when they are intellectually ready, and in their state of reflection. In the meanwhile, we simply follow the method of copying. This is a characteristic of "practice" - an apprenticeship model which isn't bad either. I true sense, Riyaz.

But then whom are these objectives really framed for? I think objectives are for teachers, not students. Prasad playfully poked to this response on our whatsapp conversation, "You mean that you will learn how to discern type?" In his rhetoric, one can reaffirm an age old observation: Teaching merely helps you clear your own notions about things. Objectives are framed so that we can test their validity and expound upon their potentials in experimenting ideas with the students. Further, objectives delineate the framework of one's feedback to students in the broader scheme of things. Once you find the student having understood the basics of a given process, you step up the difficulty level of your engagement, pushing them to think through their work in a differently plane of thought.

We had a great set of jurors for our final review: Sameep Padora, Quaid Doongerwala, Samira Rathod and Praveen Alva. I was accompanying the team of Quaid and Samira as they went along with the review, and we had some interesting pedagogic discussions over a few projects. Samira understands and values the architect's agency in crafting form, whereas Quaid was looking at the relevance of languages that different students dealt with in their design projects. One of the questions that we debated, for example was the invention versus discovery of form. I had to interrogate Samira's search for an unconventional form in projects that were conceived quite traditionally - those that focused on simple ordering and arrangement of space. I had to bring up the fact that often, there is a subversive denial of conventional form or structure in the validation of the "new". There's a strange affinity for currently for that which appears asymmetric and the absurd. In studying ancient buildings of architectural importance, or modern precedents, however, we are reminded about qualities of order and rhythm - moreso, their spatial invocations. These experiences are not free of their structural imbrications, and thus, are often employed through what we may now understand as "conventional". In our discussion, we clarified, that there is nothing wrong, thus, in bringing back the old - pejoratively understood as "copying". It is a matter of language, Quaid asserted - and how it can benefit the student's way of thinking through a building.

Our negative attitudes to evaluating processes as "copied" are a colonial legacy. It was the renaissance that emphasised upon the birth of the individual, to whom authorship was of utmost importance. The social and economic machinery of renaissance was centered acutely around the human - as an individual, which gradually led to the undervaluing of the guild. The introduction of the machine and assembly line completely destroyed any passage of knowledge through practice. In the eastern cultures though, copying has been the only way of learning. Take for example Chinese painting, which was only about repeating a process set by the master. The student iterates the painting as many times, over which, the subject under investigation itself undergoes transformation, resulting into a completely new masterpiece, a new original. In the same way, the knowledge of Indian Classical Music is passed on only in its rehearsal, or riyaz - iterating it time and again until one is able to resonate with a given tone. It is a skill honed only in practice, in copying, without any written notations.

I believe this second year studio turned out to be much like an arena of riyaz. I am not particularly sure how much students absorbed. What I am sure of, although, is that there was an induction of rigour, and its possibility. We left out the questions set out in the objectives. Perhaps, those will be taken up later when students have a method and space to reflect. It is in that time when the objective of the studio will be truly realised. Meanwhile, I still wonder if the objectives can be made integral to the evolution of the design process.















Aesthetics of Accumulation







































photographs of/from
JAK Printers, Byculla

Diwali

The smell of a lighting off wick, the camphor burning away, the jasmine incense, the sandalwood crushed with Kesar, the ghee burning Surma, the sweetness of savoury preparations, the flickering lamplights - fired or electric, the colours of Rangoli and flowers, the balcony lights, the shimmering coins, the red kumkum, the new books for prayers, the pattering crackers, the blooming flower pots, the sparkling sticks, the smoking wires, the constantly ringing telephone, the beeping WhatsApp messages, the endless forwards, the inventive Facebook statuses, the pleas to be quiet, the request to keep things unpolluted, the new clothes, the perfunctory rituals...


Another year of Diwali. 

Friday, October 06, 2017

Louise Despont Works

Louise Despont / The Invisible Fold
Published in ART India Magazine - Volume 21 Issue 3

note: The published version was edited and shortened due to issues of space. Here, the text is the original full version, followed by the published.

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Louise Despont

The Invisible Fold



Columns for rates and transactions on ledger book registers become meta-grids for Louise Despont’s pencil colour drawings that are exhibited at Gallerie Isa, Mumbai, from the 10th of June to the 1st of September. Overlaying existing rules and records of the unthreaded spreads from old registers, Despont draws new grids to order her drawings. At a distance, the works seem to be guided by the symmetry of the book-fold itself. The imposing balance within the works, gently tweaked at places invite a comparison with Rorschach Inkblots that mirror their own halves. While klecksography (the art of making images with inkblots) allows a poetic exploration of the subconscious, Despont’s careful motifs refer to mythical diagrams through which the ancients imagined the structure of the universe.

The large surfaces created by joining several pages of the book come together like the tiles of a large mural. The overall scale and execution reminds you of the present day “working drawings” that architects prepare towards the final construction of a building on site. Despont’s meticulously detailed drawings alluding to iconographies of temple towers and sculptures are no less than site documents that record material, construction details, sizes, costs and project timelines.

The soft pencil drawings hide and reveal the sub-layers evoking historical and mythical connections with their substratum. A certain time-space compact collapses the spaces of architecture and economics, art and construction and makes hidden interrelationships apparent. The ways in which the abstract and concrete aspects of production take shape through the process of art making are subtly demonstrated in the works of Louise Despont.



Anuj Daga

Louise Despont. Fort. Coloured pencil and graphite on antique ledger book paper. 187 cms x 178 cms. 2017, Image courtesy the artist and Galerie Isa.





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Samit Das's work at Tarq

Review: Samit Das's work 'Bibliography in Progress' at Tarq
published in ART India Magazine - Volume 21 Issue 3

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Drawing on the Past

Samit Das’s assemblages are mounted at the intersection of history and memory, suggests Anuj Daga.


Samit Das’s art practice requires a nuanced reading . Das juggles between the roles of a painter, sculptor, craftsman, on the one hand, and those of archivist, historian, and archaeologist, on the other. In Bibliography In Progress spread across Tarq and Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, from the 13th of April to the 20th of May, Das’s works hold questions informed by such multilayered engagements. Curated by Sumesh Sharma, Das’s show of sculpted paintings and installed pieces bring together a mélange of materials like canvas, cloth, wood, fibre, paper and metal. The resulting assemblages look fragmented and textured. Further, the constituent parts are brought together in a manner where one completes the other by means of overlapping, interjecting or juxtaposing. A unique way of seeing emerges – one that makes the viewer conscious about the ‘incomplete totality’ of our universe.

Often breaking neat boundaries, the frames extend themselves giving an impression of trays mounted on the wall. Such containers remind you of an archaeologist’s tools, within which she collects and sorts artefacts from a given site in order to arrange and narrativize them into a coherent, meaningful past. The act of looking into the tray is analogous to peeping through the window at the historical past as well as a personal memory.

For many of us, unpacking and packing our cabinets filled with memories may be a periodical activity. Why do we keep looking at our collections of tinker bits, bric-a-brac, taking things out and putting them away – they don’t necessarily go back in the same way every time. In taking things out (to create space for new ones, or otherwise), we may pile them in different ways, reconsider their categories, and regroup them to fit with other objects within our collection. However, we often miss the potentialities of the new juxtapositions that happen in the process outside the cabinet. Das’s works emphasize the dormant possibility of these unattended reorganizations that often scatter messily when pulled outside, but set themselves neatly within the cabinet.

Das has in the late 1990s and the early 2000s documented the Tagore Museum in Kolkata and recorded the confluence of design, social history, cultural resonance and architectural intervention in an exhibition titled The Idea of Space and Rabindranath Tagore that has been exhibited locally and internationally. The artworks in the current show possess a topography of their own – they refer to the Ajanta frescoes as well as to Buddhist viharas; they draw from abstraction as an art genre and bricolage as a strategy. They are cavernous, mysterious and dynamic. Amongst other references, embedded within their landscapes are drawings of rock-cut architectural structures or sculptures along with other relics, which were originally carved out of the hills, often to be inhabited, and decorated. Entering the cave is much like diving into the dark space of a treasure chest of old memories. The co-existing duality of the part and the whole resonates with that of the actual situated-ness of the Buddhist monuments which can seldom be experienced devoid of their contexts. The site is as much a part of their reading as the artefact itself.

History is often stitched, stapled and stacked – much like Das’s works. The freestanding sculptures and black and white drawings transform the gallery into an archaeological site – assembling things that seem important, provoking us to think about the ones you would choose to keep.What should stay back in the archive or as an archive? Stones, blocks, paintings and the spaces they occupy beckon us to be conscious of the quality of their negotiations. In a manner similar to American artist Joseph Cornell, Samit Das’ works sort and reveal history that is hidden within the process of its own creation.



Samit Das. From the series Bibliography in Progress. Mixed media. Variable size. 2014-2017. Image courtesy Abner Fernandes and TARQ.