Architectural Blueprints: From Ground Up

Anish Kapoor’s steel sculpture at the Palace of Versailles is swirled a controversy but, in Delhi, His In Mind is dramatically minimalist. The white acrylic stands in a corner of the vast gallery, near Zarina Hashmi’s Home Is a Foreign Place (1999). In the portfolio of 36 woodcuts and letterpress, the artist demonstrates her interest in perception and memories of home. The set has recollections of her own home, where Hashmi grew up. Noemie Goudal also looks at architectural spaces, focusing on geometric forms and as structures responding to space around them with Observatoire IV, an imagined observatory standing calm in still water. Seher Shah multiples the scale of architectural drawings, de-constructing them in Grid Corridor. There is abstract, too, in the fine lines of Brooklyn-based Yamini Nayar’s Trace 1.

Carcassonne by SH Raza

Master Takes
SH Raza, Ram Kumar, FN Souza, Ganesh Haloi

Decades before he discovered the bindu and a year after SH Raza moved to France, he painted this oil on paper board. Titled Carcassonne, it captures his impressions of the French citadel and experimentation with elements of construction. It is one of his several works in the exhibition, which also comprises his recent works that appeared in auctions, La Terre (1973) and Bhoomi (1988). Like him, Ram Kumar, too, captures the constant transformation of cityscapes, while Ganesh Haloi’s untitled tempera represents the abstractionist. FN Souza’s famous work The Red Road, on the other hand, is a splendid rendering of his home town Goa.

Waiting For Others to Arrive by Sudarshan Shetty

Surround Sound
Sudarshan Shetty, Srinivasa Prasad, Nandita Kumar

One of the rooms at the exhibition space echoes with the plaintive wail of the sarangi, punctuated with the shattering of a china cup. A single channel video takes the viewer from the inside of a dilapidated home to the exterior of the colonial building. Sudarshan Shetty’s Waiting For Others to Arrive breathes life into a once grand building in Mumbai. “It is an analogy to loss. The film is a space for regeneration and my inner urge to preserve it,” says the Mumbai-based artist. Sharing his sentiments is Srinivasa Prasad’s Bamboo House, a nest-like cocoon with calming music. The hum is broken with nature-based sounds — whales mating to the wind swirling and birds chirping — from inside Nandita Kumar’s glass bottle, where nature meets technology.

8×12 by Hema Upadhyay

Larger than Life
LN Tallur, Gigi Scaria, Hema Upadhyay

The miniature hatha yogi figures on inverted roofs, made of terracotta, speak of conquest — of death, hunger and ageing. LN Tallur’s Veni Vidi Vici delves not just into colonial history but also the ethereal desire to rule. Gigi Scaria’s Elevator also projects disparities of caste and class. The viewer enters an elevator with three side wall-length screens projecting urban homes. It gives the viewer a real-time experience the claustrophobia of urban spaces. The theme is taken forward by Hema Upadhyay’s 8×12. Denoting the size of a house in Mumbai’s Dharavi, it is made of waste material and presents an aerial view of the slum.

The exhibition is on at KNMA, Delhi, till Dec 20.