Lubna Chowdhary
Metropolis
Installation of 1000 ceramic sculptures of abstract towers, monuments and other definable forms
2019
Lubna Chowdhary is a Tanzanian Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1964. Their work was featured in several exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Jameel Arts Centre and the Galerie Klaus Gerrit Friese. Lubna Chowdhary has been featured in articles for the ArtDaily, the Ocula and The Hindu. The most recent article is Green Art Gallery Opens a Group Exhibition in Collaboration with Jhaveri Contemporary written for the ArtDaily in February 2020.
Lubna Chowdhary creates sculptural objects and site-specific artworks, working primarily in the field of ceramics. Based in London, she has a Masters degree in Ceramics from the Royal College of Art and was shortlisted for the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize. Chowdhary has completed artist residencies at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Camden Arts Centre, London and IASPIS Stockholm. She is represented by Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai.
Metropolis is a multi-object work of 1000 handmade clay sculptures that celebrate architectural ornamentation and take inspiration from the concept of ‘horror vacui’, or the fear of empty space, in Middle Eastern and South Asian art and design. Born in Tanzania to a family of Indian origin, raised in the United Kingdom, and with her extended family settled in Pakistan, Lubna Chowdhary attributes the incorporation and distortion of international design aesthetics in her practice to her diverse cultural background.
Chowdhary’s brightly coloured three-dimensional edifices merge to form configurations that resemble lively cityscapes that can’t be associated with any one locale. Abstracting towers, monuments and other less definable forms, the installation charts the material culture of our urban environment, reflecting on the complexity of the man-made world and human production. Metropolis draws on memories of cities, anthropological collections, as well as notions of the historical and the current, the handmade and the industrial, and the vernacular and the ubiquitous.
Metropolis was created over a 28-year period. Chowdhary began the work in 1991 and continued to build on it over time, completing the project in 2019.
Courtesy to Lubna Choudhary