Studio Mumbai: The Breath Of An Architect at Fondation Cartier
From December 9, 2023 to April 21, 2024, the Fondation Cartier pour l’artwork contemporain in Paris invitations Indian architect Bijoy Jain, founding father of Studio Mumbai, to create an exhibition that serves as a haven for quiet contemplation and reverie, partaking in dialogue with Jean Nouvel’s structure. Delving into the intersections of artwork, structure, and materiality, Bijoy Jain’s creative interpretation of the Fondation Cartier displays a mind-set that regards time and motion as elementary components in spatial creation.
Jain is devoted to forging an structure that finds expression via the weather of water, air, and lightweight, harmonized with the rhythm of human breath. On this showcase titled The Breath of an Architect, Jain collaborates with Chinese language artist Hu Liu and Turkish-Danish ceramic artist Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye. By means of their respective inventive processes, all three practitioners grow to be intertwined within the realms of gesture, materiality, time, motion, and area, sharing a standard sensibility and ethos. The semantics of type emerge organically via an intuitive dialogue with the speedy setting by these artists.
For deeper insights into the exhibition, designboom spoke with Affiliate Curator Juliette Lecorne, who collaborated carefully with Bijoy Jain. Lecorne sheds gentle on the partnership between Fondation Cartier and the famend architect, the exhibition’s design, and the pivotal position of time and motion in shaping the spatial expertise. Discover the total interview beneath.
Prima Materia, 2023, hut product of bamboo body tied with cotonstring and assembled with handwoven bamboo panels | picture © Ashish Shah
Interview with affiliate curator Juliette Lecorne
designboom (DB): Are you able to inform us extra in regards to the exhibition at Fondation Cartier pour l’artwork contemporain? How did the invitation to create an exhibition come about?
Juliette Lecorne (JL): We’ve been wishing to work with Bijoy Jain for a very long time. He got here a number of occasions to the Fondation, and we supplied him a type of ‘carte blanche’ as we’ve got been doing via our programming for a number of a long time, inviting worldwide architects to current solo exhibitions showcasing their observe (Junya Ishigami, Jean Nouvel, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and extra.
The thought was to supply the viewers the likelihood to find Studio Mumbai’s singular and delicate architectural observe and construct a dialogue with Jean Nouvel’s constructing. Bijoy responded with a complete creation, specifically realized for the event.
sculptural components product of stone, cow dung and lime | picture © Neville Sukhia
DB: The exhibition is claimed to supply ‘an area of quiet contemplation and reverie, in dialogue with Jean Nouvel’s constructing’. In what methods does the area reply to the museum’s current structure?
JL: In our very first conversations, the 2 first phrases that got here up had been stillness and silence. Bijoy Jain has spontaneously supplied to create an area of lull, embracing Jean Nouvel’s constructing transparency with an in-and-out perspective, similar to a human breath: out and in of our physique. This concept is embedded within the title of the exhibition, Breath of an Architect. Bijoy Jain created a particular set up echoing the constructing with out altering the unique structure—no partitions had been constructed, and no scenography was concerned.
1 Karvi panel; 2 sculptural components in stone, cow dung and lime; 2 Tazia; 1 tar object | picture © Neville Sukhia
DB: What position do time and motion play in Bijoy Jain’s work?
JL: From what I observe, time is consubstantial to his observe. First conceptually, as an architect, he sees the bodily world we inhabit as a palimpsest of our cultural evolution. Humanity strikes via a panorama in fixed evolution, whose successive writings are intertwined. Secondly, the matter and materials he makes use of are solely preindustrial, revealing the particular expertise of artisans that work with time.
Karvi panels (bamboo/cow dung/jute, thread/lime/pigment); 1stone animal lined with lime; 3 handmade wood flower vases; 1 tar object on a base | picture © Solène Dupont Delestrain
DB: For the exhibition, Bijoy Jain has invited Chinese language artist Hu Liu and Turkish-Danish ceramic artist Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye. Are you able to inform us extra about this collaboration?
JL: On a suggestion of Hervé Chandès, co-curator of the exhibition and creative managing director of the Fondation Cartier, Bijoy was invited to dialogue with Hu Liu and Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye, not essentially for an aesthetic relationship however principally for his or her ethos and approach of constructing issues. They each share the identical significance for the ritual mastery of gesture, resonance, and dialogue with materials; they share the identical ethos and posture.
Over time, Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye has perfected an intense dialogue with materials via ritual mastery of gesture. Rigor, repetition, and endurance are marks of high quality for this artist who, from the start, discovered inspiration within the cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Anatolia. On this dialogue with clay, Alev emphasizes the significance of water as a foundation for erecting earth, simply as in structure. Bijoy Jain presents Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye’s weightless items on a plinth made out of miniature hand-fired bricks. It is usually a dialogue of a distinct earth.
Hu Liu’s monochrome black drawings are created utilizing graphite, repeating iterations of the identical motion, line by line, to disclose the essence of pure components: the grass caressed by the wind, the rolling of the waves, or the silhouette of the branches of a tree. This iterative course of is widespread to Studio Mumbai of their architectural analysis.
view from the Studio Mumbai, Saat Rasta Homes, Mumbai, India | picture © Neville Sukhia
DB: How do you hope guests will expertise and work together with the exhibition area?
JL: From our conversations, we hope that the guests can experiment with this area with their senses first, and luxuriate in wandering on this particular panorama, composed of architectural fragments designed by Studio Mumbai. These transient and ephemeral buildings current a world each infinite and intimate and transport us to locations close to and much. Breath of an Architect makes an attempt to offer a glimpse, nonetheless fleeting, of structure’s sensorial emanations, the intuitive forces that bind us to the weather, and our emotional relationship with area.
