The Forest of Images at the Egmore Museum

Are art exhibitions confined to the white cube of a gallery? Do structures require a specified entrance and exit? Does sharing public spaces pay off with fluid speed or a sense of spontaneity? It’s not for everyone.

At the Government Museum in Egmore, a series of vertical and horizontal metal pieces in the tree-lined promenade play with people’s perspectives as they walk in. without a clearly demarcated beginning or end, or entry or exit, as you walk land of stories – A photo exhibition by students from across Tamil Nadu that is part of the Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB) – The porous, maze-like structure becomes a part of the experience.

“We designed the installation as a double life,” explains Deepak Jawahar, co-founder of Chennai-based space design studio The Architecture Story (TAS). “When you’re inside it, you’re immersed in the art and it gives you a sense of movement through it. But when you’re outside of it, in a museum or on the busy flyover beyond the wall, it’s something striking, something Gets the essence that catches your eye when you go about your everyday routine.”

The modularity of the structure was created keeping in mind the purpose of a traveling exhibition of CPB – they plan to take it to various schools across the state and perhaps even to an Indian art fair. “So, it has 40 vertical pieces and an approximately equal number of horizontal pieces that you can quickly take apart, store, and move wherever you want,” says Jawahar. The panels are located in a series of L shapes. “There’s a panel to your left and front, but nothing to the back and right. In some ways, it’s like a Piet Mondrian painting!”

A bird’s eye view of the establishment. photo credit: Nivedita Gupta

beyond convenience

Spatial design is at the core of TAS. “A lot of our work, whether it’s designing a house, an installation or a public project like that [internally, they call the design the Forest of Images], has always been associated with the idea of ​​the human body and how it connects with space,” says co-founder Justin de Penning, who also runs The Grid, a co-working space in RA Puram. “That’s why we don’t want to create a defined space.”

We also saw this in earlier installations of both, e.g. seven voids At the 2019 Magnetic Field Festival of Contemporary Music and the Arts. Another modular design – with truss and trampoline – took inspiration from the Indian Cotand explored the bed as a social space that encourages play, rest, and socialization.

Land of Stories | photo credit: Nivedita Gupta

Are these fluid spaces where they see the design title? “It is too early for us to predict how the design is changing now, especially in light of the pandemic. But there is definitely a big push to make something that is extraordinary even under normal circumstances,” says Jawahar. “There’s a lot going on online, so if you have to go somewhere and try something, you have to give that extraordinary feeling. So the question for designers is ‘What is life beyond convenience?'”

De Penning hopes that this development is taking place in all aspects of the design. “When you think about retail, everything is moving in a broader direction. That is where the future lies,” she concluded.

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