Sarai Reader 09 was a proposal based project that was curated by Raqs Media Collective, supported by Devi Art Foundation in 2012-2013. It followed a critical shift in my practice as it was the first time I consciously began to think of architectural space itself as a material. “To work with space but not occupy any particular space” was the crux of my proposal for the project. Over a duration of three months, I activated four spaces, allowing each spatial encounter to inform and shape up the work.
Sarai Reader 09 Project Proposal
This site-specific work served as an extension to my earlier works, titled Black Drawings and Drawing Sculptures: Wire, and functioned as a bridge between my existing practice and my emerging interest in spatial intervention and drawing within a three dimensional space. It was a direct response to the initial interaction with built environments and acted as a documentation of spatial experience situated within architectural structures.
The project took place in the context of Cybermohalla Hub, a mobile structure functioning as a collaborative studio, archive and urban space, which was temporarily stationed at the Devi Art Foundation’s iconic building in Gurugram. Interacting with the transient nature of this structure helped me realise space as something that could be activated, altered and reimagined. Created using fishnet wires with a permanent marker, these previous works from early 2012 were conceived as drawings without a conventional fixed surface, and Sarai Reader 09 became the moment where it pivotally served as an entry point to the accompanying space. Subsequently, this work also became a guide for my later project Drawing in Space.
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The second space activated within this site-specific project, this work was located in the project room present within the site of Devi Art Foundation building in Gurugram. Functioning as a space where people primarily came to read, the room was characterized by its semi black painted walls with a single window existing within the structure, and opening onto the exterior. When viewed from within the wide berth of this broadly spaced window opening, a brick wall with its multiple tilts and shifts in alignment could be observed outside. This site-specific engagement explored and extended my earlier work exhibited at my MA degree show at Nottingham Trent University, UK in 2011. Here, I directly painted white color into the broad width of the window’s cavity that was originally black, subsequently intervening upon the surface using pen, hair and glue as material. I realised a transformation of the space with a mere change in color, with the white now accentuating the subjected section, demanding attention in its own right. The concept of the window, instead of its inherent quality of looking through, now became a thing to look at, subtly reversing its conventional function. Thereby, mutating the nature and structure of architecture through perceptual reconfiguration.
For more images: https://parulguptastudio.com/work/sarai-reader-09-project-room/
The linear drawing was made directly on the floor of an iron bridge connecting the two buildings at Devi Art Foundation, this was the third space activated within this site-specific project. The work emerged from a line of inquiry into the very nature of a surface and its role within the act of drawing, exploring, “what is a surface afterall?” While drawing has remained a central thematic concern in my practice, I have also been increasingly interested in expanding the said terminology of drawing beyond its conventional measure. This work was developed as an enlarged extension of my Black Drawings work with a change in the material and surface engaged with. Utilising strips of black electrical insulation tape, I applied it directly on the corridor’s iron floor. An act of mark making materialised with unorthodox materials, the work shifted the act from something that is primarily viewed to something that is physically encountered. As the viewer’s body moved across the work, the drawing became subject to physical movement, spatial proximity, and bodily experience. Exploring the possibilities of what it might mean to draw on a floor or to perhaps walk on a drawing, to witness how a space reacts with bodily intervention and how the body responds to it all as it finally happens. The work thereafter opened up a deeper inquiry into how a drawing might exist spatially and phenomenologically, and became a germinating seed for my Drawing in Space series subsequently.
For more images: https://parulguptastudio.com/work/site-specific-sarai-reader-09/
The fourth and final space activated within this site-specific project, this work was situated upon the already existing scaffoldings present at the site of the Devi Art Foundation building in Gurugram. These structures were an architectural intervention by Sayantan Maitra Boka, as a part of the exhibition curation and design. While being in this space, the sight of light rays falling upon the scaffoldings and its emergent shadows caught my initial point of interest towards this engagement, after which the subsequent spatial extension of these pre-existent lines followed.
Although the shadows formed as a result of light do not have any particular significance quantitatively, but qualitatively it is a very crucial part to the whole seeing process, as it makes our world appear real. The things required to create shadows are objects and light. One light equals one shadow and if we move the light, the shadow disappears or shifts. In response to the basic principle of light and shadow, I worked with the materiality of perception here.
This installation was made using transparent tape on the aforementioned scaffolding and one light source, but two visible shadows on the wall. Therefore, it naturally birthed curiosity within the minds of witnessing viewers, now brimming with a want to locate the supposed second source of light responsible for the diagonal shadow. Through this very act, the work emphasises the role of ‘perception’ through which we construct our understanding of reality. It was the transparent nature of vertical strips of adhesive tape that, when positioned on the scaffolding, acted as if a shadow had been cast on the wall. Thereby creating an illusion that challenged the observer’s initial reading of the very space. Further, the viewer here also becomes an integral part to activate the work. Unfolding through a process of looking, questioning and eventually discovering, it is this precise moment that the work fully comes into being as it exposes our preconceived notion of perceiving reality.
For more images: https://parulguptastudio.com/work/sarai-reader-09-gallery/
