Domus India Magazine - September 2019

In this issue

The September edition primarily speculates on design through exhibitions on architectural and artistic practices entwined with architectural engagements. In the Books section we dwell upon Monsoon Feelings, edited by Imke Rajamani, Margrit Pernau and Katherine Butler Schofield. Brimming with evocative essays, this volume explores the history of emotions in the monsoon in South Asia since the twelfth century through the many tropes of poetry, paintings, architecture, cinema, landscape, festivals, music and medicine. In Indian Aesthetics, we explore the Kolvi Caves in Rajasthan, cut around the entire circumference of a hillock. Once perhaps used by members of the monastic community for prayer or meditation, this complex of Buddhist rock-cut caves remains uninhabited today; only a deafening silence greets visitors.
The issue includes detailed features on three important exhibitions. The first is Foy Nissen’s Bombay — at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, CSMVS, Mumbai — that brings together over fifty years of work by Foy Nissen, a lensmen of Danish descent who combined a keen sensibility with a quiet discipline. Secondly, an exhibition project titled We Colonised the Moon by Hagen Betzwieser and Sue Corke employs a range of DIY production techniques that roots their ‘Moon-project’ in absurdism, where installations and inquiries are characterised by slogans and catchphrases. Bringing together selected projects from more than a decade of the practice of studio MADe, a recently held exhibition comprised over a dozen projects, presented through models and drawings, focusing on conceptual ideas and their [generative] principles.
Exploring urban continuity and transformation through his work, as both complement and counter to his experience building in contemporary India, New Delhi-based Martand Khosla has developed, over time — through the material and substance of his questions for architecture and architects — a rich, robust artistic practice.