Urban Space Series, 2005 - 2007
The main objective of this project is to question and understand my own reaction to urban space around me. How do I perceive space in today’s context? How do I represent space in contemporary art sense? How does it challenge or differ from traditional notions of space?
Space, conventionally, has been defined as “a limited extent in one, two, or three dimensions : distance, area, volume” or “a set of mathematical elements and especially of abstractions of all the points on a line, in a plane, or in physical space. Naturally, the depiction of space had been just as straightforward as its definition. The Renaissance perspective, for an extensive period of time in art history, was the only mode of representation of space (at least in Western Art). With which, it could create a highly illusionistic, real-like rendering of a space. Space was absolute and definite.
But space is that and much more. The idea of space as a material figure, defined by physical boundaries was no longer adequate.
“Around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge, of social practice, of political power… the space, too, of classical perspective and geometry… bodied forth in Western art and Philosophy, as in the form of the city and town.” - Henri Lefebvre
In modern and contemporary theoretical frameworks, space has been related to other entities such as time, memories, experience etc. It is much more complex, imbued with a myriad of meanings. Hence the objective lies not in representing an existing urban space as it is but rather drawing inspiration from existing urbanscape, to reflect its complexity and my personal engagement with space.