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 1
by Rohini Devasher
Fungi ⇄ Firmament - Drawings from the Field
by Rohini Devasher
on Friday, 5th July 2024
at 6:00 pm IST
Zoom Link
Devasher is an artist and an amateur astronomer. For the SEA conversation, Devasher will share drawing based work that maps the complexities of ecology, cosmology, and technology viewed through the twin lenses of wonder and the strange/horror. At the core of this is a recognition of the entanglement of relationships in the natural world, but also of the deep strangeness created by their collisions and fusion. The theoretical grounding of her work draws from the history of science, astronomy, philosophy and speculative fiction.
About
Devasher’s work has been shown at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, San Francisco (2024), Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco (2024), Kunsthalle Bern, (2024), Museum Catharijneconvent Utrecht, Netherlands (2024), Museum Tai Kwun Contemporary (2023), Collegium Helveticum, Zurich (2023), Warehouse 421, Abu Dhabi (2023), Rubin Museum of Art in New York (2021–22); the Sea Art Festival in Busan, South Korea (2021); the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (2021); Kunst Leuven City Festival in Belgium (2021); Sharjah Biennial 14(2019) among others.
Devasher is the first Indian artist to be honored by Deutsche Bank as 'Artist of the Year' for 2024-25. In 2023 she dual resident in Arts at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR) in Bengaluru, India.
This is an online lecture series, supported by the Urban Centre Mumbai. It is free and open to everyone across the world.
session 2
by Afra Shafiq
Literal and Metaphorical Patterns
by Afra Shafiq
on Friday, 19th July 2024
at 6:00 pm IST
Zoom Link
Expanding the idea of drawing, to also look at the act of drawing from, this talk will think about how tracing patterns in existing material and the study of lines, grids, motifs and repetition can lead to newer and endlessly emergent ways of meaning making.
about
Afrah Shafiq is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Goa, India. Her work takes hybrid forms that bring together text, sound, animation, code, and sculpture to create interactive, sometimes simulated atmospheres to experience and unlearn. She often seeks ways to retain the tactile within the digital and the poetry within technology. Afrah’s work has been included in the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2023; Video Art Pavilion at the Asian Art Biennale, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2022; Lahore Biennial (LB02), Lahore Pakistan; 2019; Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India, 2018, WorldBuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist At Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf and Centre Pompidou-Metz; “Very Small Feelings” at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, among other exhibitions in India and globally.
This is an online lecture series, supported by the Urban Centre Mumbai. It is free and open to everyone across the world.
about
Afrah Shafiq is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Goa, India. Her work takes hybrid forms that bring together text, sound, animation, code, and sculpture to create interactive, sometimes simulated atmospheres to experience and unlearn. She often seeks ways to retain the tactile within the digital and the poetry within technology. Afrah’s work has been included in the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2023; Video Art Pavilion at the Asian Art Biennale, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2022; Lahore Biennial (LB02), Lahore Pakistan; 2019; Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India, 2018, WorldBuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist At Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf and Centre Pompidou-Metz; “Very Small Feelings” at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, among other exhibitions in India and globally.
This is an online lecture series, supported by the Urban Centre Mumbai. It is free and open to everyone across the world.
session 3
Drawing Relationship: Drawing as Research Method
by Nora Wuttke
Drawing Relationship: Drawing as Research Method
by Nora Wuttke
on Friday, 2nd August 2024
at 6:00 pm IST
Zoom Link
In this talk, drawing and artmaking emerges as mode of empirical enquiry where the drawing itself is secondary to the act of drawing. Nora will be talking about sketching as research method, drawing on her experiences as a social anthropologist and as an architectural designer. What can the disciplines that she calls her home learn from each other? In this, she will take you on a joinery across media, from drawing Yangon General Hospital in Myanmar to an installation based on the same drawings to a current book project.
about
Nora is a social anthropologist and architectural designer, using her art practice as a mode of enquire in her academic research. She holds an architecture degree from the Technical University in Munich and a PhD in social anthropology from SOAS, University of London. Nora is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University, Fellow of the Durham Energy Institute and Research Associate the SOAS, University of London. Her scholarship sits at the intersection of infrastructure, health, and energy bound together by her methodological interventions with artmaking.
This is an online lecture series, supported by the Urban Centre Mumbai. It is free and open to everyone across the world.
about
Nora is a social anthropologist and architectural designer, using her art practice as a mode of enquire in her academic research. She holds an architecture degree from the Technical University in Munich and a PhD in social anthropology from SOAS, University of London. Nora is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University, Fellow of the Durham Energy Institute and Research Associate the SOAS, University of London. Her scholarship sits at the intersection of infrastructure, health, and energy bound together by her methodological interventions with artmaking.
This is an online lecture series, supported by the Urban Centre Mumbai. It is free and open to everyone across the world.
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.
