FOLLY MEASURES| VISHWA SHROFF PREVIEW: THURSDAY, 9TH JANUARY 2020 | 5:30 PM – 9:30 PM | MUMBAI GALLERY WEEKEND

About the Exhibition

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 uncoversman’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”.

About the Artist

Vishwa Shroff (b.1980) started her artist training at The Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda in 2002. She continued on to the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (UK) in 2003. Her career so far has seen six solo exhibitions –‘In Residence’ (2018) at Swiss Cottage Gallery, London (UK), ‘Drawn Space’ (2016) curated by Charlie Levine at TARQ, ‘Postulating Premises’ (2015) at TARQ, ‘One Eye! Two Eyes! Three Eyes!’( 2012)  at the Acme Project Space, London (UK), ‘Memories of a Known Place’ (2012), Birmingham (UK) and ‘Room: Collaborative Book Show’ (2011), Vadodara (India). The forthcoming exhibition at TARQ will be her seventh solo exhibition.

She has taken part in residencies like Swiss Cottage Library, London, UK (2017); Paradise Air, Matsudo, Japan (2015) and Clarke Griffiths Levine, Birmingham, UK (2012).  Besides participating in artist residencies all over the world, Shroff has also been a part of group exhibitions such as ‘Bedroom Spaces’ (2019) at Hospital Club (UK),  ‘ Eating Bread and Honey’ (2018) at SqW: Lab project space, Mumbai (India), ‘Camden Draw’ (2017) at Swiss Cottage Library, London (UK),  ‘Reading Room’ (2016) at Saffron Art, New York, ‘Reading Room: Leaves, Threads and Traces’ (2015), The Winchester Gallery (UK) and ‘Momento Mori’ (2015) at TARQ.

TARQ

Art gallery in Mumbai, Maharashtra

Address: F35/36 Dhanraj Mahal, C.S.M. Marg, Apollo Bunder, Colaba, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400001

Hours: 

Open ⋅ Closes 6:30PM

Phone: 022 6615 0424