Breath of an Architect, an exhibition created by Bijoy Jain that has been built from the idea of generating a physical and emotional experience. The exhibition is an invitation to breathe, to wander in stillness and rediscover silence, which is achieved through the use of light and shadow, the tonality and texture of the materials, and thus a sensory experience is generated in resonance with the materials. .
Made to the rhythm of breathing and molded by hand, the exhibition installation is composed of architectural fragments, which summon light and shadow, clarity and gravity, with materials such as wood, brick, earth, stone and water . This sensory need is not a characteristic prioritized only by the architect, but also by the two invited artists, the Chinese painter living in Beijing, Hu Liu, and the Danish ceramicist of Turkish origin living in Paris, Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye.
Makaloo’s Dome, made from a bamboo structure, covered with cowhide and lime / Mandala Study, 2023, bird shaped geometric frame of bamboo tied with nistari silk / Lime and red cinnabar/ cochineal pigment drawn with silk on granite bench. Photograph by Ashish Shah.
"Silence has a sound, we hear its resonance in ourselves. This sound connects all living beings, it is the breath of life. It is synchronous in all of us. Silence, time and space are eternal, as are water, air and light, our elemental construction. This abundance of sensory phenomena, dreams, memory, imagination, emotions and intuition arise from this set of experiences, embedded in the corners of our eyes, in the soles of our feet, in the lobes of our ears, in the timbre of our voice. , in the whisper of our breath and in the palm of our hand".
Stone and terracotta sculptures, facades of traditional Indian houses, rendered panels, lines of pigment drawn with thread, bamboo structures inspired by tazias (funerary monuments carried on the shoulders in memory of a saint during Shia Muslim processions), these transitional structures and ephemera present a world that is both infinite and intimate, transporting us to places near and far.
Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai Breath of an Architect. Photograph by Marc Domage.
All three give equal importance to the ritual mastery of the gesture, the resonance and the dialogue with the matter; They share the same spirit and sensitivity. Hu Liu's monochrome black drawings are created with graphite, repeating iterations of the same movement to reveal the essence of natural elements: grass caressed by the wind, the movement of waves or the silhouette of tree branches, conveying a timeless solemnity. Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye's ceramics are also the culmination of great skill and dexterity, as well as an intense dialogue with clay, and weightlessness in the experience of working with it.
For Bijoy Jain, our physical world is a palimpsest of our cultural evolution. Humanity moves through a constantly evolving landscape, whose successive writings intertwine. In Breath of an Architect, we are offered a glimpse, however fleeting, of the sensory emanations of architecture, the intuitive forces that bind us to the elements, and our emotional relationship with space.
