Martand Khosla
Joule
Wood
2019
102 x 35 in
Martand Khosla lives and works in New Delhi, India. His art practice explores urban continuity and transformation, as both complement and counter to his experience building in contemporary India. Having founded and run an award-winning architecture studio for over fifteen years (Romi Khosla Design Studios). Martand initially pursued art to explore how construction-fueled employment shapes identities and nostalgia. Situated as both participant and observer, he employed tools of the State, such as the ubiquitous rubber stamp, to render its imprint on lives within traditional definitions of power and dispossession. Brick dust collected from his construction sites became a language of tension, allowing material to pay tribute to both the temporary and permanent, to construction and demolition.
An architect’s natural preoccupation with space inevitably emerges in his work, not as a challenge to ‘build’ – but rather to foreground an object’s intrinsic potentiality. His works traverse the lines between sculpture and object, movement and remnant, material and memory. Inspired by his studies of repetition and the human churning of industrialization, he replicates the micro-processes of macro-construction. And simultaneously, he moves from the lens of authoritarian power to its dispersion, exploring the transformations that lay in between.
Courtesy of martandkhosla.com, artsy.net