The team at TARQ is delighted to present Folly Measures by Vishwa Shroff. In this exhibition, Shroff continues to journey through the everyday, focusing on the idea of transience and impermanence. The catalogue is accompanied by an essay penned by Mumbai based independent curator, writer and researcher, Veeranganakumari Solanki. The show is both meditative and thought-provoking in the manner in which Vishwa’s drawings of architectural form uncovers man’s relationship with space over a period of time.
What most would overlook or consider mundane, Shroff is able to weave together highlighting engagement and exclusion through her medium of drawing. The audience is immediately placed into a curious yet contemplative mood by the detailed window panes, finely structured partisan walls (playfully named, Partywall) and speckled cracked floors.
Shroff’s precision and use of earthly tones is not merely a reflection of fashion trends, or time periods but access, encroachment and restrictions. Her work reaffirms that time does not stand still for architecture and the changes within these architectural structures become indicators of the lives lived within these spaces.
Solanki points out in her essay, “at a moment when history’s future is increasingly uncertain, visual colonial comforts and follies are pulled out in the perception and adaptation of architecture. Residues and ruins legitimise our current situation of being, both in the physical and mental state, thereby making us collective by-products of the past. The patterns and forms seen in the drawings are from inhabited spaces. We have all perhaps chanced upon spaces such as these in the city that is dominated by a British architectural identity. The familiarity of these foreign elements conflictingly embeds itself in a feeling of normalcy and home. The shared feeling of sentimental colonial amnesia is acknowledged through habitual mundane elements that visually play out in the spaces we occupy.”
