Anselm Reyle
His brilliant decorative pieces are brave statements in an art world that so easily dismisses anything that seems 'commercial' or market oriented.
Reclining Buddha Murals
These are photographs of the detailed murals that decorate the walls and windows of the Reclining Buddha temple. It exists in a much larger temple complex called the Wat Pho, which contains several hundred images of Buddha, many stupas, a huge Bodhi tree, stone statues and smaller temples.
Out of Sight
With an unused underground car park as its gallery walls, Out of Sight investigates the resilience and flexibility of art, and the need for its development with supporting communities in unorthodox circumstances: an appreciation for the otherwise overlooked in the chosen location compliments the political provocation of the role of the outsider in society and rebellion against industry precepts.
More on Shadows
In his essay In Praise of Shadows Japanese novelist Tanizaki writes about the conflict between western and eastern aesthetics in the modern world. He says that Japanese 'find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.' He emphasizes beauty in subtlety and that which cannot be seen too clearly, leaving some of the experience to our imagination. Pallasmaa talks of something similar when he emphasizes the importance and intimacy of darkness.
Post-Traumatic Urbanism
Cities like Mumbai and Beirut have developed in unstable uncertainty and in many ways are resilient survivors. They have adapted with 'redundant networks' and 'diversity and distribution' rather than 'centralized efficiency' which makes them flexible in the face of shocks to infrastructure (Lahoud, 2010).
Dayanita Singh
I am especially interested in her attempts to express her own visions of a place or city, opposing the singular story people usually expect about India, that of 'sensational catastrophes and human failures'
Danger of a Single Story
This brilliant TED video by novelist Chimamanda Adichie articulates what I often have to say about Mumbai while here in UK. Namely, yes there is poverty and yes we have slums - but these are proud people who are more than just the anonymous poor.
Collaboration: The Third Hand
Through collaboration the singular voice of the artist is muted or dispersed, it is a break away from a singular artistic identity. The author introduces the idea of a 'third hand,' or ghost artist which is an elusive other or combined identity created in collaborative works. This third independent existence is in itself 'uncanny' because such a constructed ghost identity 'blurs the distinction between the real and phantasmic.'
Site-Specific Art
In his book Eyes of the Skin, Pallasmaa talks at great length about the beauty of human perception and how the senses interact with each other to form experience. He emphasizes the importance of a sense experience as a whole. He says there is a bias to the eye in the architectural practice because people are focussed on how a building looks rather than how a body can move within it or how it feels. When it comes to the perception of places he discusses the importance of emotion, memory, imagination and fantasy.
Group Critique 3
Other mentionable works where the audience completes the piece are Tall Ships by Gary Hill and Anthony McCall's work with light.
Neon Chandeliers
This gay shop in Venice was awesome, first because I've never seen a proper one - there are no sex shops in India, at least not in plain sight. Second because it is filled with neon chandeliers and paintings and guess what - a neon toilet called 'Water Closet Hotel' !
Crystal of Resistance
'But art is not resistance to something. It is resistance as such. Art is resistant because it resists everything that has already existed and been known. Art, as a resistance, is assertion, movement belief, intensity, art is 'positive.' Art resists tradition, morality and the factual world. Art resists every argumentation, every explanation and every discussion.'
The Heard and Unheard
'By constructing an "architectural music-space...made possible by the microphone," Music While We Work explores how artistic practice can intervence in the social space of labor production at the intersection of history and everyday life.'