GRAHAN / ECLIPSE

« What happens when one object rolls over another object? In an eclipse, the overlapping bodies might not be in comparable scale to each other. Like the Moon obscuring the Sun takes a similar size in appearance and that’s how it’s able to produce a total eclipse. » – Vishal K Dar

Eclipse is a magical moment when a small object can appear extremely substantial, the instant when it stands in the foreground. This particular thought influenced the present exhibition based on the idea of correlation between Vishal K Dar’s site-specific works and diagrams, produced in the last decade. Like in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film « The Eclipse » (1962), where the common spaces turn into extraordinary ones and become the true protagonists of the movie, the exhibition constructed itself on the site’s capacity to tell stories and evoke experiences.

In this show, we are inviting the viewers to follow the journey of a diagram (a schematic representation of an idea) becoming a site work or a sculpture. A conceptual voyage which may include many stages materialized through sketches, drawings and models. Each diagram has the capacity to produce many interconnected works translated into a language of lines of light or strips of bamboo. An expression which operates like a binary code constructed on the tension between white and black, the straightness of the beams of light and the strangeness of bamboo.

One of the characteristic features in Vishal K Dar’s work is that it expands through the phenomenological, an experience of art where, much like in digital technologies, scale is not an absolute.

Born in 1976, lives and works in Gurgaon (India)

Vishal K Dar is an artist / architect, based in Gurgaon, known for site-specific projects that deploy computer programmed lights in large scale abandoned sites. His works simultaneously invoke the vastly mythic and deeply personal by creating experience territories with digital technologies, architecture and earthly elements. Through place-making, he instills a sense of dreamlike quality in his works while still allowing them to address contemporary issues. Light is a recurring motif in his works and was powerfully harnessed in PRAJAPATI, inspired by the wandering king form the Vedic texts. 

In 2009, Dar started a series of mysterious glowing ‘insect’ sculptures made from stolen car lights, sourced from the Old Delhi grey markets. These sculptural lights may remind us of sci-fi monsters or sometimes of exquisite lapidary work in the gemstone. Luminous and tantalizing in the dark, their gnomic formal strangeness gives them a mysterious glow with their riddle-like messages that flash at us in triple color codes. These uncanny totemic creatures could be conceptually connected to the ‘post-human’ theory.

In 2012, he produced NAAG-Z, a site-specific work which came to life through cutting-edge projection mapping technology aspiring to deconstruct the notion of sculpture. Dar exhibited a new version of this project titled NAAG-XY at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco as a part of the N.E.A.T. (New Experiments in Art and Technology, 2015).

For the 11th Shanghai Biennale, Dar created STORM DEITIES, seven oscillating beams of light set to varying metronomic meters, in the belly of a 165m tall industrial chimney of the city’s defunct thermal power station. This site-specific installation activated the space; investigating a world made of time, and like time, it played with cognitive illusions, as a world of impressions; a world without architecture; a world of shifting space.

Solo Exhibitions/Projects:

2016 / Storm Deities (Site-specific), 11th Shanghai Biennale.

2015 / MARUTS (Site-specific / Public Art supported by TIFA India) Pune, Maharashtra.

2015 / Untitled. (Site-specific sculpture), Private Collection, New Delhi.

2015 / Mareech. Gallery Nature Morte, New Delhi.

2015 / PRAJA-PATI (Site-specific / Public Art supported by IndiaArt Fair). New Delhi.

2013 / PRAJA-PATI (Site-specific / Public Art supported by OUTSET India). Gurgaon, Haryana.

2012 / Rise of the BROWNationals. Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai.

NAAG (in collaboration with Gabriel Dunne. Site-specific / Public Art supported by OUTSET, India). Mehrauli, New Delhi.

2011 / @24 Abandoned house (Site-specific / Public Art supported by OUTSET India). New Delhi.

2010 / BROWNation. Gallery Espace, New Delhi.

2010 / Boonden. (Site-specific sculptures in Stainless Steel) Private Collection, Alibaug (Near Bombay).

Group Exhibitions:

2018 / Reclamation Ground. Alserkal, Dubai.

2018 / When is Space. JawaharKalaKendra, Jaipur.

2017 / Ground Beneath My Feet (Site-specific). Serendipity Art Festival, Goa.

2017 / The Open Hand. Gujral Foundation. 24JorBagh, New Delhi.

2016 / Love in the Time of Choleric Capital. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

2016 / Enactments and each passing day. Kiran Nader Museum of Art, Noida, India.

2016 / Transformations – London Design Week. The Guardian Gallery, London, UK.

2015 / N.E.A.T. (New Experiments in Art and Technology). The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, U.S.A.

2014 / Science of Speed. Gallery Nature Morte at Famous Film Studios, Mumbai.

2014 / Listen Up! (a public sound art exhibition across New Delhi) co-curators – Diana Campbell Betancourt and Tim Goossens.

2013 / A Collection of Manifestos For The Instant. KHOJ, New Delhi.

2012 / India! Group Show of Indian contemporary artists. Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Sao Paulo Brasilia.

2012 / Video Wednesdays II, Gallery Espace, New Delhi.

2011 / India! Group Show of Indian contemporary artists. Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janerio, Brazil.

2011 / Second Sight, Contemporary Experimental Film & Video works from India & Diaspora. Galerie La Centrale, Montreal.

2010 / By George, Cherry Art Foundation, New Delhi.

2010-2013 / Move On ASIA, Gallery LOOP, Seoul. TATE Modern, London. Para/site Art Space, Hong Kong. ZKM, Karlsruhe.

2009 / IndiaDialogue, Museum Gabarron, Spain. Satyagraha, Casa de la India, Spain. Relative Visa, Bodhi Space, Mumbai. Vistaar, The Stainless Gallery, New Delhi. Dear Jabir, The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai. India Art Summit, Galerie Christian Hosp (Berlin).

2008 / Video Wednesdays I, Gallery Espace, New Delhi.

Exhibitions (as Curator):

2013 / (p)ROTO-type YEAR TWO. Stainless Art Gallery, New Delhi.

2012 / (p)ROTO-type YEAR ONE. Stainless Art Gallery, New Delhi.

2007 / BROWNation. Experimental art gallery, New Delhi.

2005 / Dot-matrix. Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi.

Residency:

2017 / Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California, USA.

2013 / KHOJ, New Delhi.

2009 / KHOJ, New Delhi.