MAPPING THE AGE OF ARCHITECTURE
We delve into the ‘Surface Encounters and Strange Beings’ to understand the art exhibition at the HH Art Spaces, currently underway at the Goa Brewing Company, Sangolda.The exhibition looks into migration, evolution, and science, and it tries to examine what has occurred over the years and how that has led us to where we are now, how it perhaps needs to evolve and possibly how it is in the process of changing.
Given that our condition during the pandemic has made us stop and think about where we are going as a species, much art has risen out of it as a context. One such exhibition has evolved at the H.H Art Space, Goa that is dedicated to the artist-led practices of drawing and performative art. Curated by Mario Ashley D’Souza, the exhibition Surface Encounters, Strange Beings, featuring 20 artists from Goa and Mumbai opened around the end of December and runs all the way till March.
Featuring 20 artists from mid-career and emergent disciplines it puts out quite a variety of names and works: Astha Patel, Avian D’souza, Diptej Verneka, Divyesh Undaviya, Julien Segard, Madhavi Gore, Madhu Das, Madhurjya Dey, Munir Kabani, Nikhil Chopra, Rai, Romain Loustau, Sahil Naik, Shilpa Mayenkar, Shivani Gupta, Shubham Kumar, Shyamli Singbal, Thomas Luis, Urna Sinha, and Vineha Sharma.
“The exhibition is something we have been wanting to do for a while but because of the lockdown due to the Pandemic things did get delayed. It originates with the idea of contact, of surfaces being held apart from surfaces encounters with ‘strange beings’ on a material planet, where our bodies are in constant mutation,” says D’Souza from his quarantine hotel in Sri Lanka where he is holed up due to the Pandemic. He indicates that the exhibition is divided into four different ‘essays’, where they look at the first architecture, nature, vision and the human mind.
“Architecture is unnatural, and it eventually falls toward nature, which is what someone like Sahil Naik has interpreted in his diorama that is based on an old structure in Panjim (Panaji),” says D’Souza. The building over the past years has been abandoned and nature has naturally caught on to it, changing it from a center of development to a relic of the past. The second ‘essay’, goes beyond nature, where an artist like Nikhil Chopra has envisioned a landscape that seems almost from a ‘past life’, once again touching upon nature’s capacity to take over.
The third room sees nature as a belief system, where the human mind takes over as it is in a state of ‘isolation’. This may be seen in Madhavi Gore’s work that looks into that relationship while in the fourth room an artist like Julian Segard’s work looks at those abandoned spaces of architecture that we do not even ‘consider part of living’, like under the flyovers where the disenfranchised and marginalized build their homes, where freedoms are cut off and fences are drawn. “During the pandemic in France, I was quarantined in a small cabin, so when I came back to India I was happy to go out onto the streets and look at the architecture and the decay and paint it. The rate at which cement is being used to standardize architectural thinking all around the world, it feels like the Portuguese architecture in Goa will become more and more like relics,” he says.
Divyesh Undaviya shares his experience of creating the work for the project: “After discussing the entire premise of what D’souza was trying to do, my main inclination was towards the surfaces because often that is what encounters space…I’m interested in how it touches us and we do certain gestures and rituals that contributes to the whole understanding of the surface in a bigger way,” says Undaviya. “I’m dealing mainly with the paper-works and its surface. I explore the idea of the psychological space and the metal image that you play with and visuals that are inclined toward this surface,” says Undavidya who has created a small sculpture and two drawings, like the corner of a room located in the center of the room, and a brick wall that opens up in different shapes and a bed that opens up urbanization, a drawings.
Shubham Kumar talks about his work that he created for the project. The body of work Ghare, Khet, Dera, reflects on the histories of serfdom, caste-based violence, and land politics through the site and metaphor of a field/farmland. “Works in red and green come from the shifts that I have seen by leaving my residence. Having grown up in Gaya in a farming family, I was privy to many first-hand anecdotes of violence and witnessed land riots through the late 90s till 2005,” says Shubham Kumar.
“Drawing from this archive of stories sourced from my immediate family and juxtaposing them against the timeline of political conflicts between landed caste groups and landless communists/revolutionaries, I investigate how the personal can navigate the communal and the state,” he adds. For him land functions as geography, a site for hierarchies that he interrogates.
Astha Patel creates simulated environments for the not-so-distant future. The natural world adapts to a post-human landscape in a re-wilding that occurs in the aftermath. These deeply personal imaginations emerge from a need to understand human-nature relationships; mankind’s need to classify as a mode of understanding; long spells spent in the wild and the ideas of conservation.
“These encounters with landscapes and forms have intrinsically forged the world we know. It has also stoked curiosities for those that are hidden, perhaps frozen in ice; and the ones that are emerging as possible futures,” says D’Souza adding that it all starts off as signs, drawings and eventually stories and songs – these speak of knowledges of ritual, remembrance and remedy– have been transmitted and translated across time and region. They have consistently challenged the divisions of culture, propagated by nations and borders, to percolate and spill. Through gaps, cracks and fissures – ideas of audacity and promise have seeped and survived.
The landscape is the dominion of natural forms, set into rhythms of subsistence and conviviality. The ambition of architecture to be natural or “be one” with nature, is impossible. To lay concrete, reclaim, land-fill and terraform will always remain an intervention, and an intrusion – synthetic and forms against nature – that will eventually slip off the soil, sink or collapse into the ground that holds it. The only thing that will and will not remain constant is the landscape – changing, but always the surface explains D’Souza adding that Surface Encounters and Strange Beings bring together ideas that re-frame land, process and rituals of survival; and evolution – thinking through ideas of revolution, resistance and considered optimisms.
The project will be adding fresh work to the spaces from the 25th of February onwards, interchanging it with the old works. The process intends to continue in the coming year as well, where artists and friends support the independent space so that they can all come together, be comfortable and continue to share their work on the project as we know it will continue till Mid-March.
Text by Georgina Maddox
Images Courtesy: HH Art Spaces, Shubham Kumar, Divyesh Undaviya, Nikhil Chopra, Astha Patel
Find more about the Artists and their artworks:
http://www.hhartspacesfoundation.org/about
http://www.hhartspacesfoundation.org/20192020
https://www.navhindtimes.in/2022/01/15/uncategorized/imagining-the-unknown/
