SAREENA ​KHEMKA

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Half- built spaces, crumbling structures, live on after us as fragments reminding us of the loss of perfection. Construction sites that at times remain always in progress, abandoned, in the hopes of being completed someday.  In such spaces, various forms of growth merge and overlap with built environments creating unusual landscapes that combine the natural and manmade, seeping into the cracks atop many surfaces to regenerate and preserve parts, while others deteriorate.  

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These mixed media pieces seek to map out, forms of biological and manufactured environments, that fall within the gaps of dichotomous thoughts between construction and destruction, temporality and permanence, organic and the inorganic; specific to no particular geographical area, merging layers of multiple metropolitan cities that can be rearranged in diverse configurations, making it adaptable to multiple ways of seeing. The stark dichotomy of urban landscapes are visible within the glitzy modernised buildings of today that stand in contrast to the architectural and material decomposition seen within cities. Images of construction and unfinished, demolished or derelict edifices are not unique to a particular city or space, but a common feature in the face of urban sprawl. 

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Robert Smithson, an American painter wrote that ruins are ‘dynamic’ calling them ‘dialectical landscapes’ that are deep-rooted in the ‘geological past and a catastrophic future,’ where, these spaces are stuck somewhere in the middle of building and decaying, hence creating modern relics that do not follow a specific chronological time, as they belong to both the past and the future.

Cities like nature have a life cycle, where they germinate, grow, flourish, explode and then start to wither, crumble, deteriorate and eventually either die or regenerate.  Similarly all objects even if they hold no inherent value in our present, eventually evolve to a new version of itself, becoming relics given enough time, begging the question of what is of vital significance in our present-day to preserve and what is to be left to take its natural course. As an ever expanding metropolis, these works are not only reminiscent of the loss and the pathos of decay and desolation but also give the hope of growth and regeneration, in turn compelling the viewer to interpret the city from varied perspectives.