A blank canvas can be an artist's nightmare. Curator Himali Singh Soin introduces a new dimension to the challenge and pushed nine artists to work within the confines of a blank white cube. The result is the forthcoming show “Reconstructing (White) 3” that opens at The Loft at Lower Parel, Mumbai, on May 23.
The show marks the transformation of The Loft — located in the printing shed of an erstwhile textile mill in Lower Parel — from an experimental art space to a studio apartment that will function as a gallery for a year. A morphing that gallery director Anupa Mehta has christened The Square Foot Project.
Space is at a premium in Lower Parel, once a bustling textile district that now houses corporate houses, upscale malls and premium residential quarters.
“The project aspires to review the dynamics of space. It has been re-designed by Anand Patel, an Ahmedabad-based architect who also created The Loft's first avatar. It has gone from being a white cube of sorts to becoming a studio apartment that will function as an apartment gallery for a year,” says Mehta.
It is this ‘white cube' image of the space that Soin has exploited to curate the show. “Since the Loft was working with the constraint of space, so did I give the artists a constraint: to work within a 1 foot x 1 foot white cube. Not only does the white cube reintroduce the idea of blank slate upon which art might be viewed unconditionally, it also subverts the traditional gallery, both in its size and in the eccentric spatial ideas contained inside it,” Soin explains.
Nine artists, deliberately chosen because nine is a cube number, from the Indian art world — Hema Upadhyay, Mithu Sen, Abir Karmarkar, Prajakta Potnis, Gautam Bhatia, Zuleikha Chaudhari, Niyeti Chadha, Praneet Soi and Chittrovanu Mazumdar — have interpreted this space in their unique way. Some confront space through more direct architectural means and others access interior and psychological rooms, she adds.
Zuleikha Chaudhari is working with the idea of traces of thought left in spaces that undergo transformation, Gautam Bhatia with greed and gluttony in domestic spaces, Abir Karmakar deals with the dominance of the male figure as a function of the rigid structures of society, Hema Upadhyay reminisces about the past where the cube becomes a looking glass.
Says Mehta of the transformation of The Loft, “We hope that the viewer will be inspired to respond to the art works differently, given the dynamics of space will now be less distanced, as is wont in a pristine white cube space, and the art will be displayed akin to the manner in which it is done in a home.”
Reconstructing (White) 3;Curated by Himali Singh Soin, At The Loft, Mumbai, May 23 to July 14
