Forest of images at the Egmore Museum

This modular metal installation at the Egmore Museum proves why spatial design is finding many takers

Do art exhibitions have to be confined to the white cube of a gallery? Do structures need a designated entry and exit? Does the sharing of public spaces put paid to fluid movement or a sense of intuitiveness? It’s a no, to all.

At the Government Museum in Egmore, a series of vertical and horizontal metal pieces in the tree-lined promenade play with people’s perspectives as they walk in. With no clearly demarcated beginning or end, or entry or exit, as you walk through A Land of Stories — a photo exhibition by students across Tamil Nadu that’s part of the Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB) — the porous, maze-like structure becomes a part of the experience.

“We devised the installation as a double life,” explains Deepak Jawahar, co-founder of Chennai-based space design studio The Architecture Story (TAS). “When you are inside it, you are immersed in the art and it gives you a sense of movement through it. But when you are outside it, at the museum or on the busy flyover beyond the wall, it becomes something striking, something a bit abstract that catches your eye as you go about your everyday routine.”

The modularity of the structure was created keeping in mind CPB’s aim for it to be a travelling exhibition — they plan to take it to different schools across the state and perhaps even to the Indian Art Fair. “So, it has 40 vertical pieces and an almost equal number of horizontal pieces that you can quickly disassemble, store and move wherever you want,” says Jawahar. The panels are positioned in a series of L shapes. “There is a panel to your left and front, but nothing to the back and the right. In some ways, it’s like a Piet Mondrian painting!”

Spatial design is at the core of TAS. “A lot of our work, whether it’s designing a house, an installation or a public project like this [internally, they call the design the Forest of Images], always engages with the idea of the human body and how it engages with space,” says co-founder Justine De Penning, who also runs The Grid, the co-working space in RA Puram. “That’s why we don’t want to create defined spaces.”

We saw this at the duo’s earlier installations too, such as Seven Voids at 2019’s Magnetic Fields Festival of Contemporary Music and Arts. Another modular design — with trusses and trampolines — it took inspiration from the Indian charpai, and explored the bed as a social space that encourages playing, resting and socialising.

Are these fluid spaces where they see design heading? “It’s too soon for us to make a presumption about how design is changing now, especially in light of the pandemic. But there is definitely a larger push to create something that is extraordinary even in ordinary situations,” says Jawahar. “There is so much going on online, so if you were to make the effort to go somewhere and do something, it has to give you that extraordinary feeling. So the questions for designers is ‘what is life beyond convenience?’”