AYESHA SINGH - Hybrid Drawings, Liminal Gaps, Mumbai

The Hybrid Drawings offer a synthesis of transcultural identities experienced in India's build landscape. Layering coexistences, continuances, disjunctures and dissimilarities onto the same continuous line drawing, each form contains an amalgamation of various architectural styles which include Brutalist, Indo-sarasenic, Deco-sarasenic, Modern, Mughal, Gothic, Victorian, Hindu and Sikh templar architecture from cities in India including Bengaluru, Jaipur, Kolkata, New Delhi, Mandu and Mumbai.

The work references two distinctive perspectival archetypes- the visual collapse, expansion and layering of perspectival space as encountered in miniature painting practices is embodied by the layout of the sculptural-lines titled Hybrid Drawings; whereas Site Lines, the lines on the floor, wall and ceiling present Brunelleschi’s discovery in the Renaissance of perspective containing vanishing points, horizons and orthogonals which is taught worldwide in schools of art and architecture today, including in India.

The work here rests on a perspective drawing with two vanishing points. As the audience walks through the space, the singular and multi-planar works either reveal their complexities and forms, or entangle sight-lines to completely visually collapse into a vertical line. Reflecting an experience termed ‘anticipated nostalgia’- a state that perceives the present and the future through the prism of loss and disappearance, while thinking about the present where puritan motivations dominate public imagination- here the forms and histories overlap, and will be flattened and revealed through perspective itself. As such Liminal Gaps can be seen as moments in the present where history and significance can be altered, removed, or made unfamiliar.

How does time function in this space? The work resist chronological embodiment of history, to present it as a lyrical layering, a composition of multiple presents and narratives experienced in a singular moment.

Your experience of the work is determined by how you decide to navigate the space.

Hybrid Drawings +

Interventions by Brendan Fernandes

As a part of the opening and interventions during the course of the exhibition, Brendan Fernandes worked with local dancers and choreographed responses to the Hybrid Drawings at "Liminal Gaps."

Our initial conversations spoke to our undertakings with ideas of cultural displacement, migration, collective agency and the post colonial narrative- be it via architecture or dance, suitably so, the dancers here improvise as they move through the space. Thinking about thresholds, portals, the breathing monument, and the weight of architecture. The dancers were given prompts and a chronology that determined change through improvisation/the dancers desire/decision on how they'd like to measure time and move through the space.