Site Specific  I  Sarai Reader 09  I  Devi Art Foundation
2012-2013
Curated by RAQS Media Collective
Adhesive Tape on Floor

Sarai Reader 09 was a proposal based project that was curated by Raqs Media Collective and its exhibition 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 the work.

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.

Link to the project https://parulguptastudio.com/work/project-sarai-reader-09/