SEA CITY is the School of Environment and Architecture’s outreach programme. SEA City organizes events, lectures, symposia and exhibitions in order to engage with the larger artistic and cultural discursive sphere within and outside the city. SEA City events are completely open to all public, and are attended by a diverse group of people including students, architects, professionals, academics and locals.
NEXT on SEA Conversations
Drawing Worlds
Monsoon 2024an online lecture series
Architects and their relationship to drawing has been central to pedagogy at SEA. The question is one that we contend with closely, and the unresolved nature, or rather the changing cast of our own understanding is the port of embarkation for the series of conversations in the upcoming semester.
The mainstay for all dialogue in this regard is that since the architect is tasked with imagining new form, their role is essentially about making a meaningful spatial encounter for the inhabitant. This would mean that they must develop a sensitivity, criticality and a humaneness in their approach to built form, and simultaneously think of form phenomenologically, and create an aesthetics of meaning and experience in this encounter. Architects and their positions as spatial practitioners come from a deep and laborious engagement with the drawing - which become a means to not simply describe form, but also inscribe its associated phenomena - sensorial, mental, psychological, environmental or social. Drawing is the language that mobilises form, thought and experience. It is rooted in the practice of image and image-making that stems from intertwined histories of visual cultures.
The Monsoon 2024 SEA Conversations looks at, and looks to various practices of drawing - here an expanded visual practice that gets produced through not only modes of seeing and observing, but also reading, listening, writing, talking - those that aid the process of critical interrogation and interpretation, that engage with the tactile and palpable - bodies and measures and quantifiable entities, as well as intangible aspects like social relationships, sensorial experiences, memories and meaning, temporalities and active imagination. These practices are set up as various horizons on the contemporary drawing landscape and conversation with them is meant to articulate for us new questions and methods regarding seeing and drawing, newer spatial interpretations and from them forms of engagement, and also a fresher politics of participation with our visual worlds.
speakers
all dates for 2024
5 July Rohini Devasher
19 July Afrah Shafiq
2 Aug Nora Wuttke
16 Aug Shrimanti Saha
30 Aug Sayan Skandarajah <<
27 Sept Parismita Singh
4 Oct Jasmine Nilani Joseph
session 5
Drawings as Sites, Sites of Drawing
by Sayan Skandarajah
Drawings as Sites, Sites of Drawing
by Sayan Skandarajahon Friday, 30th August 2024
at 6:00 pm IST
Zoom Link
This talk engages with the role of architectural representation in seventeenth-century screen paintings of Kyoto, Japan, aiming to test and examine the implied spaces of the city that were defined by the original artists. Using the process of drawing as a critical instrument to further interrogate these spatial devices, my design-led approach exposes manipulations of space as opportunities to reconsider and inhabit the voyeuristic gaze in the imagination of the city. Translated as “Scenes in and around Kyoto”, the Rakuchu Rakugai zu folding screens use oblique aerial parallel projection to create portrayals of Kyoto that are at the same time maps, planning documents and works of art. The research outlines how the use of representation in these screens disrupts the Eurocentric narrative of truth, objectivity and rationality that had been attributed to architectural representation at the time, and instead employs a more abstract, temporal and wandering gaze charged with political motivation. By learning from its manipulation of drawing convention to convey ideas of place, identity and memory, I will outline an original set of practice-led research that has not only drawn from but also contributed to architecture and contemporary artistic practice.
ABOUT
Sayan Skandarajah is a Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Reading, specialising in drawing-led research and critical design processes. Alongside his role in leading design studio and modules of visual communication at Reading, his LAHP funded PhD research, at The Bartlett School of Architecture feeds into his own reflective practice. His work scrutinises the architectural design process and sets out original pathways to considering acts of drawing, tracing and cartographic projection as a means of speculative world-building.
He is co-curator of the Cartographies of the Imagination project, an ongoing exploration into map-making, drawing and the mind’s eye. Sayan holds an MArch degree in Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and an MA (Hons) degree in Architectural Design from the University of Edinburgh.
This is an online lecture series, supported by the Urban Centre Mumbai. It is free and open to everyone across the world.
SEA PAVILION 2024
WINNER ANNOUNCED
We received a wonderful set of responses that ranged from those addressing the magic of the monsoon to working with its quotidian life and materialities to those addressing its human and more than human engagements.
The winning entry:
Three special mentions:
1) Majid Abidi for ‘Is it just about us?’
2) Ankita Dhal & Eshan Pradhan for ‘The Memory Workshop’
3) Rushimuni Prayogshala (Hrushikesh Hirulkar and Manish Shravane) for ‘The Paper Pavilion’
Details here
WINNER ANNOUNCED
We received a wonderful set of responses that ranged from those addressing the magic of the monsoon to working with its quotidian life and materialities to those addressing its human and more than human engagements. The winning entry:
Liminal Pavilion
by Rust Collective - Dhruv Sachala and Neel ShahThree special mentions:
1) Majid Abidi for ‘Is it just about us?’
2) Ankita Dhal & Eshan Pradhan for ‘The Memory Workshop’
3) Rushimuni Prayogshala (Hrushikesh Hirulkar and Manish Shravane) for ‘The Paper Pavilion’
Details here
session 4
Multifaceted Narratives
by Shrimanti Saha
Multifaceted Narratives
by Shrimanti Sahaon Friday, 16th August 2024
at 6:00 pm IST
Zoom Link
In this talk, Shrimanti shall discuss how in her art practice, drawing becomes a tool to unravel images and develop layered story structures with references from a range of sources like history, literature, mythology, science fiction, comic books, art history, miniature paintings, news reports, as well as memory, conversation and personal experiences. As an artist working majorly in the medium of drawing and painting; she shall share images of large scale drawing based works on paper and elaborate on the references in them, the process of making and the thematic implications that they may have as contemporaneous, layered narratives.
ABOUT
Shrimanti Saha is an artist working in the medium of drawing, painting and animation. Saha completed her BVA and MVA in Painting from M.S. University, Vadodara, following which she worked as a freelance illustrator for a few years. She has had a solo exhibition in New Delhi last year and she has also been part of numerous group exhibitions in India and abroad. Saha received the Inlaks Fine Arts award and an art grant from the Foundation for Indian Contemporary art. She has also been part of international artist residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary arts; Vermont Studio Center; and OMI International Art Center in upstate New York.
This is an online lecture series, supported by the Urban Centre Mumbai. It is free and open to everyone across the world.
ABOUT
Shrimanti Saha is an artist working in the medium of drawing, painting and animation. Saha completed her BVA and MVA in Painting from M.S. University, Vadodara, following which she worked as a freelance illustrator for a few years. She has had a solo exhibition in New Delhi last year and she has also been part of numerous group exhibitions in India and abroad. Saha received the Inlaks Fine Arts award and an art grant from the Foundation for Indian Contemporary art. She has also been part of international artist residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary arts; Vermont Studio Center; and OMI International Art Center in upstate New York.
This is an online lecture series, supported by the Urban Centre Mumbai. It is free and open to everyone across the world.
