Chapter two - article one
Living Breathing
Architecture
The work of Bijoy Jain, architect and founder of Studio Mumbai, reflects a deep concern for the relationship between man and nature, in which time and gesture are essential factors. Throughout his exhibition Breath of an Architect, at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, he shared this inspiring approach with visitors.
Portrait of Bijoy Jain during the exhibition Breath of an Architect, Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2023
Bijoy Jain imagined the exhibition as a physical and emotional experience: an invitation to breathe, to wander in quietude and to rediscover silence. For the architect, this aspect was key, “Silence has a sound: the sound of breathing. We hear its resonance in ourselves. This sound connects all living beings; it is the breath of life.”
Light and shadow, lightness and gravity, wood, brick, earth, stone, and water convened to compose a sensory experience, in resonance with the materials. Crafted by hand and in rhythm with the act of breathing, the exhibition’s installation was composed of architectural fragments.
Prima Materia surrounded with various structural elements and seats made out of stone, asphalt and tar.
Sun Tower, woven bamboo mat layered with cow dung, lime plaster and pigment. Lines drawn with thread coated with ferrous oxide pigment/ sculptural stone elements covered with lime
Stone and terracotta sculptures, facades of traditional Indian dwellings, rendered panels, lines of pigment drawn with thread, bamboo structures inspired by tazias—funerary monuments carried on the shoulders in memory of a Saint during Shiite Muslim processions—these transitory, ephemeral structures presented a world that is both infinite and intimate, carrying the visitor to places both near and far.
Bijoy Jain also invited Chinese painter Hu Liu and Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye, a Turkish-born Danish ceramist who lives in Paris, to join him in creating the exhibition. All three give the same importance to the ritual mastery of gesture, to resonance, and dialog with material; they share the same ethos and sensibility. Hu Liu’s monochrome black graphite drawings are created with repeated iterations of the same movement to reveal the essence of natural elements: grass caressed by the wind, the rolling of the waves, or the silhouette of tree branches, conveying a timeless solemnity. Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye’s ceramics are also the culmination of great skill and dexterity, as well as an intense dialog with the clay.
“As an architect, it is about the consideration one gives to the making of things, about being immersive and attentive to the environment, the materials, and its inhabitants, in the possibility for space and architecture to be inclusive.”
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