Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai
The breath of the architect
The Cartier Foundation presents an exhibition specially created for the institution by architect Bijoy Jain, founder of Studio Mumbai in India. He is the author of a work testifying to a deep concern for the relationship between man and nature, and of which time and gesture are essential factors. Exploring the links between art, architecture and materials, Bijoy Jain offers the Cartier Foundation a total creation: a space of reverie and contemplation in dialogue with Jean Nouvel’s iconic building.
Bijoy Jain imagines an exhibition that is experienced as a physical and emotional experience. The architect’s breath offers visitors a true invitation to breathe, to wander in complete peace, to rediscover silence: “Silence has a sound, we hear it resonate within us. This sound connects all living beings. C is the breath of life. It is synchronous in each of us. Silence, time and space are eternal, just like water, air and light, which are our elemental construction. This abundance of sensory phenomena, dreams, memory, imagination, emotions and intuition come from this reservoir of experiences, anchored in the corners of our eyes, in the soles of our feet, in the lobes of our ears, in the timbre of our voice, in the murmur of our breath and in the palms of our hands.”
Summoning shadow and light, lightness and gravity, wood, brick, earth, stone and even water, the architect designs a sensory journey, in resonance with the material. Developed to the rhythm of the breath and shaped by hand, the exhibition displays an installation composed of fragments of architecture.
Sculptures in stone or terracotta, facades of vernacular Indian habitats, coated panels, lines of pigments traced with wire, bamboo structures inspired by tazias – funerary monuments carried on the shoulders in memory of a saint during Shiite Muslim processions – these transitory and ephemeral constructions present a world that is both infinite and intimate and transport us to places as close as they are distant.
At the suggestion of Hervé Chandès, curator of the exhibition and artistic general director of the Cartier Foundation, Bijoy Jain also invites the Chinese artist living in Beijing HU Liu and the Danish ceramist of Turkish origin living in Paris Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye. Granting the same importance to the ritual mastery of the gesture, to the resonance and dialogue with the material, all three share the same ethos and the same sensitivity. HU Liu’s black monochrome drawings are entirely made in graphite, through the iteration of the same movement, in order to reveal the essence of natural elements: the grass caressed by the wind, the surf of the waves or the silhouette of the branches of a tree. Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye’s ceramics, as if weightless, are also the result of great dexterity and an intense dialogue with the earth.
For Bijoy Jain, the physical world we inhabit is a palimpsest of our cultural evolution. Humanity crosses a constantly evolving landscape, whose successive writings intertwine.
The architect’s breath attempts to give a glimpse, however fleeting, of the sensoriality that emanates from architecture, of the intuitive force that binds us to the elements and of our emotional relationship to space.
