Vishal K Dar (b. 1976) is a Gurgaon (India)based artist/architect. 

Dar uses satire and scale to address deeper personal issues, and his practice often extends outside the gallery and into the public realm.

Dar’s art practice is diverse in terms of medium, where transformations and the nocturne are some of the more visible themes seen in his works. Through place-making, he instills a sense of dreamlike quality in his works while still allowing them to address contemporary issues. 

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 sometimes remind us of sci-fi monsters and sometimes of exquisite lapidary work in gemstone. Luminous and tantalising 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 are uncanny totemic creatures that could be conceptually connected the ‘post-human’ theory.

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

Light continues as a recurring motif and was powerfully harnessed in his ambitious 2013 site specific work ‘Prajapati’ which refers to Louis Khan’s texts on silence and light and Vedic texts.

In 2014, Dar exhibited a series of sentinel like insects at the iconic Famous Studios in Bombay. These insects were created with the automobile lights, salvaged from Delhi’s grey market, embedded with micro-computer controllers.

In 2015, in continuation with his investigations with site specific works that create experience territories and hallucinatory zones, Dar produced Maruts in an abandoned 40,000 sqft storage facility outside Pune city. He re-imagined the storm deities as computer-controlled oscillating beams of light set to varying metronomic meters over vast reflection pools filled with 200,000 gallons of water.