This is undoubtedly the season of art debuts. Close on the heels of Gurgaon-based Suchitra Gahlot’s first solo show reflecting the loneliness in our Internet-driven lives and just prior to Brooklyn-based Chitra Ganesh’s debut inspired by the drama in Amar Chitra Katha comic books at Gallery Espace, comes the first solo show at Nature Morte gallery in Delhi by Asim Waqif.
Starting September 7 and titled khalal (meaning disruption), the exhibition is in keeping with the artist’s significant reputation for creating works of ambitious scope and prodigious implications. Delhi-based Waqif studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi and after initially working as an art director for film and television, later started making independent video and documentaries before moving to a dedicated art-practice.
His recent projects have attempted a crossover between architecture, art and design, with a strong contextual reference to contemporary urban design and the politics of occupying/intervening/using public spaces. Some of his projects developed within abandoned and derelict buildings in the city.
Concerns of ecology and anthropology often weave through his work and he has done extensive research on vernacular systems of ecological management, especially with respect to water, waste and architecture. Artworks often employ manual processes that are deliberately painstaking and laborious, but the products themselves are usually temporary and sometimes even designed to decay.
For instance, his recent installation titled Bordel Monstre which was shown at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, mostly revolved around trash. Waqif said in an earlier interview to artinfo.com: “To me, looking in a garbage can is almost like doing archaeology. You can learn a lot about a community or an individual from the trash that they produce. When I visited the Palais de Tokyo three months ago, they were in the process of changing exhibitions and there were huge piles of materials from the previous show that were going to be destroyed. That made me think about what, with artistic systems, we create as trash. Today development and progress are often closely associated with a consumer economy. And it’s as if we could repair the damage from excessive consumption by throwing everything into the provided containers. I wanted to shed light on these containers and recycle them into an art object.”
As an architect, Waqif’s foundation is always our built environment, which extends to research into materials, the politics of urban planning, a consciousness of the manipulations inherent in consumer society, and the questioning of aesthetic parameters.
The artist’s title for the exhibition alludes to our un-built environment, the emphasis being on the corrupt, misused and degenerate aspects of our civic spaces.
The exhibition will include sculptures, installations, videos and photographic relief constructions. In all, the artist approaches the concept of the “leftover” as his inspiration, investigating issues of sustainability and recycling, public and private memories, residual spaces, illogical bureaucracies and policies arrived at by chance.
As would be expected, the artist will create new works in response to the architecture of the gallery space and also situate some older works in new configurations for this display.
(Poonam Goel is a freelance journalist who contributes articles on visual arts for unboxedwriters.com)