A void you'll love

Vacuity isn't always about emptiness; it's most often about space for growth. An exhibition in town throws open the interpretationu00a0

'Art' and 'open' are two words, one world. There's no dearth of things that can be created from nothingness, and how many media can mould themselves to take form for a single idea, often invisible in itself. Drawing, photography, sculpture, video and site-specific installation -- Incursion artists haveu00a0 captured them all. The exhibition explores the ways in which architecture and the design of public space can serve to define, direct and control the individual and the social body, reinforcing economic and class definitions among other social hierarchies and constraints. The environments here are designed as a symbol of control, influencing what we experience in terms of what we see and what is invisible.


Gateways and games: Work by Tejal Shah and Swapna Tamhane
revolve around the hide-and-seek between light, shadows and spaces

Custodian's canvas
It aims to reveal the prevalence of structures within which we live in our everyday life, as well as to underline the potential gaps in dominant structures into which artists and culture makers have been able to insert their individual or collective voices. The artists have derived photos from performance, drawing from photo, sculpture from urban interventions or object-based installation from social experiments -- all of these works are from outside of a typical studio practice. "I visited many studios and then thought of bringing up this topic.

A lot has been generated out of the issue, and artists can actually feel it," says Heidi Fichtner, curator. But before you write it off as a political-bureaucratic-attention-seeking exercise, there are clarifications. "The aim is notu00a0 to make a political statement, nor does it have any pretension toward making a social impact. It is simply to provoke thought about avenues that are open for us to perceive, and intervene into the social landscape as we know it", she adds.

And yes, the participants are well-versed in what they've wandered into. Trained as an architect, Asim Waqif has been engaged in guerrilla urban explorations of abandoned sites in Delhi that he has recorded via photographic documentation, covert performance and sculptural interventions. "Some of my works are direct, such as a stop-motion video of the artist constructing an elaborate sculptural installation from found materials in an abandoned space where construction has been halted, incorporating a glimpse into his subversive activities with a voiceover that blurs the lines between."

Riyas Komu, on the other hands, takes the opportunity to point out the way in which almost all public facilities -- schools, prisons, hospitals -- replicate The Panopticon's (see box) objectives in various respects. "My intention is to bring in the ideas of individual rebellion and the omnipresence of the State in a symbolic way, which causes growth", signs off the artist. Make the most of the space while it's there.