overview

In a world derived from the division of cells, our anatomies and ecologies suggest that all creative persistence rests on a paradox - that of making in the act of breaking. Indeed, planes become dimensions at their own intersections, precipitation precedes infiltration, a whole is understood by its parts, and even a heartbreak is acknowledged as enlargement by love.

SPLINTER PUNCTURE SLIVER SPALL - co-presented with Nature Morte and curated by Phalguni Guliani - assembles six contemporary artists whose practices investigate the relationship between rupture and the emergence of new realities through various forms and materialities.

On the ground floor, cloud formations, star bursts, clusters of boulders, and cerulean inversions of the heavens employ architectural and environmental motifs to form a visual discourse on - as within - the spaces beyond, beneath, and between various surfaces. With the gestalt of these pieces imbuing while prompting movement, vacancies in the works and in the gallery gesture toward the positive charge of negative space. Fields of blue showcase absence as presence. Groupings of ghungroos form silent scores that insist on the prerequisite of distance to define a rhythm. Incinerations and perforations create intervals of space, alive and pulsing with the possibility of their own inhabitance.

On the first floor, a new curatorial cadence takes over and the viewer gains, in the works themselves, a proverbial dance partner. Here, literal lines between drawing and sculpture are blurred, extending the conversation from materiality into the realm of continuity. Shapes, shadows, lines, and layers show up echoically, drawing through space itself as they draw on the notion that interventions create motion. And in so doing, these aesthetic articulations draw out the idea that a puncture's capacity to reform is contingent on the plasticity of its environment - somatically, structurally, or cosmologically.

Bonds are forged through breakage, circulation occurs in the contraction, and a story is made complete in the act of punctuation. Combined, the two galleries and six artists composing SPLINTER PUNCTURE SLIVER SPALL break literal ground to invite viewers into a moving meditation on the contradictory qualities of creation.

About the artists

Asim Waqif

Asim Waqif is a Delhi-based artist, architect, and art-director. His prior training in architecture informs his artistic practice, which focuses on architecture, art, and design with strong contextual references to contemporary urban design and the politics of occupying public spaces. Concerns of ecology and anthropology are often interwoven in his practice, which has involved extensive research on vernacular systems of ecological management, especially with respect to water, waste, and architecture.

Ayesha Singh

Ayesha Singh practice highlights existing socio-political hierarchies and established power systems through architectural formations and interrogations. Employing spacial interventions that emphasise collaboration and coexistence, her works aim to unpack architectural decisions induced by authorities of state in order to counter social narratives. Singh works across several mediums ranging from drawing, kinetic mechanics, participatory performances, photography, public installations, sculpture, and video, often shapung sites of discourse and record to question the assumed permanence of buildings and the histories omitted during construction, restoration, and destruction.

Jitish Kallat

Jitish Kallat is a Mumbai-based artist whose practice ranges from the conceptual to the material. Blurring the intersections of science, philosophy, history, and mathematics, his work often explores recurring motifs of time, mortality, and sustenance. Using abstract, schematic, and representational languages, he engages different modes of address, viewing the ephemeral within the context of the perpetual, the everyday in juxtaposition with the historic, and the microscopic alongside the telescopic.

Martand Khosla

Martand Khosla art practice explores urban continuity and transformation as complement and counter to his experience building in contemporary India. After working extensively as an architect for over twenty years, Khosla pursued art to explore how construction-fueled employment shapes identities and nostalgia. His architectural practices emerge in his art, bridging lines between sculpture and object, movement and remnant, material and memory.

Parul Gupta

Parul Gupta art practice focuses on movement in architectural spaces as a generator of perpetual experiences. Her work centers itself on the concept of and revolves around parallax and the exploration of geometry and light in spaces. In her site-specific works, the site and its structural elements become active participants.

Vibha Galhotra

Vibha Galhotra is a multimedia artist whose practice addresses the shifting topography of a world radically transformed by climate change, consumerism, capitalism and globalisation. Sharing conceptual links with land art movements of the 1960s and 70s, Galhotra’s work draws from varying disciplines - including ecology, economics and spirituality - to inform a poetic visual and renewed response to the impact of human activity on our planet.