Another Documentation reflects the artist, Avantika Bawa’s continued interest in investigating subtle links between drawing, sculpture and architecture. Through the choice and placement of works, Bawa presents the gallery as a ‘construction-site’ where notions of the everyday that may otherwise go unnoticed are put into creative order. The resultant assemblage simultaneously address and challenge conventions of art making, display and documentation.
Components of Another Documentation include altered functional objects, photographs and drawings that extend along the wall and floor. An enormous scaffold painted a cautionary orange, occupies a central part of this assemblage. Its futile yet commanding presence mirrors the ambitions of Mumbai’s vertically growing landscape, much like a modern-day Tower of Babel. Photographs of architectural drawings, placed on modified workhorses at various construction sites are presented as a series of sequenced images. These appear to serve the function of capturing the work of a faux land surveyor.
This staged approach creates a platform where dialogue between construction and deconstruction, site and non-site, process and product are explored. Consequently, Another Documentation engages with the architecture of the gallery while also opening up conversations on the endless and often reckless construction in a heavily urbanized Mumbai.
Artist Statement
I am interested in transforming the act of drawing into sculptural gestures that intimately connect to architectural spaces. This process emerges due, in part, to my relationship to the legacy of minimalism and its emphasis upon reductive form, modularity and literal scale. I explore the tension between wholeness and fragmentation, gravity and suspension, containment and dispersal. Industrial materials such as brick, cardboard, wood and concrete as well as common actions such as sitting, leaning, tilting and stacking become the fodder and fuel for my works.
My practice reflects the regional, cultural and geographic influences of the time and space in which I am working. I explore new territories that allows for subtlety, anti-monumentality and unexpected levels of candor. Perhaps this comes from my ability to navigate the borders between drawing and sculpture, reticence and ambition, Punjabi and English.
Pay Attention
Avantika Bawa’s art operates at the intersection of drawing, painting, and sculpture. She clarifies or complicates existing spaces by pointing out the obvious or overlooked with an arsenal of drawn lines, stacked volumes, and painted perimeters. Bawa is a contemporary artist steeped in history and alert to context, making hybrid works that exploit conditions in galleries and museums, as well as less traditional venues.
A native of New Delhi, India, who has lived in the United States for decades, Bawa uses her experiences to affirm multiple points of view, and her endeavors often possess contradictory impulses—elegant and funky, cerebral and bodily, condensed and dispersed. A heady roster of predecessors seems to have informed her practice, including Robert Smithson, Ree Morton, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Donald Judd. She has internalized the tenets of Minimalism and Land Art, and consistently finds ways to test their use in the post-everything pluralism of art making today.
Whether she’s painting a perspectival shape on a wall at SALTWORKS in Atlanta, or installing low slung trays and imposing columns at Suyama Space in Seattle, Bawa creates a call for intensified looking. Her 2010 exhibition at the Columbus Museum in Georgia, titled Re: Re: Re:, was an apt description of the ways she repeatedly regarded that institution, referencing the vaulted ceiling in her lozenge-shaped wall works, and incorporating objects from the storage rooms to assert a public/private porousness.
She consistently combines aspects of real and pictorial space in analytic and improvisational ways, forcing new “ways of seeing” on viewers. This phrase is of course, the title of a seminal text by John Berger, which I imagine Bawa pouring over as a student, before moving on to Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Donald Judd’s Specific Objects, Lawrence Weschler’s conversations with Robert Irwin in Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, and other examinations of site, display, and perception.
Another Documentation is Bawa’s most recent project, and it combines a wider palette of materials than her previous efforts, and references a range of environmental, economic, and labor-related issues in Mumbai. In this ambitious exhibition, she takes advantage of the venue’s soaring height by constructing a large scaffolding tower whose function is implied but not utilized. A group of photographs show grey easels on which sit panels featuring the kind of step-by-step assembly instructions that come with beds and bookcases from big box retailers. These diagrammatic stations are displayed on unfinished rooftops and concrete courtyards, proposing platforms, shelving and enclosures which might be built. Their forms clearly relate to the spaces in which they’re placed. Emptiness is an important factor here, too, with many of the depicted structures only partially filled in, as if waiting for further recommendations. Like a charrette for developers, architects, or community stakeholders, these propositions realize that all efforts are a combination of contingency and consensus.
Avantika Bawa is constantly thinking, making, talking, and traveling. Her work reminds us to pay attention and to recognize options. Our open eyes and hearts provide transformative possibilities.
Stuart Horodner
Artistic Director, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA, USA
About Avantika Bawa
Avantika Bawa is an artist, curator, and academic. She has an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1998) and a BFA in the same from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India (1995). She was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2008), Vermont Studio Center, VT (2009), Milepost 5, Portland, OR (2010) and Jentel Artist Residency Program, WY (2010).
Note worthy exhibits include; solos at Suyama Space, Seattle, WA; The Columbus Museum, Columbus GA; Saltworks Gallery and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta, GA; Lalit Kala Academy and Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, India; Gallery Maskara, Mumbai, India; Disjecta and Portland State University, Portland, OR. She was part of the South by East Biennial in Boca Raton, FL; and juried group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, GA, The Drawing Center and Smack Mellon, NY and SAVAC, Canada. Her works has been reviewed in international publications such as The New York Times, Art Papers, Art Lies, Art India, Art Asia Pacific, The Oregonian, and The Times of India amongst others.
Bawa’s curatorial work began with a hotel room show during the Art in Chicago fair (98’) and has grown through her studio and gallery, aquaspace – a laboratory for new and multi media art. In April 2004 she was part of a team that launched Drain - Journal for Contemporary Art and Culture (www.drainmag.com). She is currently Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Washington State University, Vancouver, WA. Her work can be viewed at www.avantikabawa.net.