The Shape of Space is an exercise in the subjectivity of perception. The artists in this exhibition present a kind of self-knowing that emerges from encountering the spaces that define us — the homes we live in, the people in whose company we exist, and the collective memory we carry that allows us to envision futures. We are relational beings who take shape in juxtaposition to our surroundings. Regimes of identity inscribe themselves onto our bodies, turning us into sites where reality itself is continually negotiated. Equally, the spaces we inhabit are constructed in our minds, brought into existence by our perception. To truly inhabit our environs, then, is to participate in their making and meaning.

The artists here are keen observationalists and this has myriad consequences. Some contend with human touch in the most delicate and sensitive of ways, reimagining skin as barrier and bone as scaffolding to frame the body as its own architectural structure. Some formulate possibilities both mythological and fantastical, resisting societal expectation and invoking realities that could be. Others find new truths in the abstract, deploying kineticism to unsettle architecture’s claims to neutrality and permanence. Here, artists vividly depict the way light bends around a pillar, shadows cast meaning into the corners of a room, or brutalist concrete structures yield to recasting as traditional textiles of Sindh and Gujarat. Many are skeptical of the truths we tell ourselves and make naked the absurd that disguises itself as necessity.

We seek to shine a light on the edges of the amorphous, to feel out what this place is and what it contains. This is an invitation to daydream. To let your mind wander over the crevices and into the slipstreams of imagination. To feel and respond to the abstracted spaces, forms and emotions conjuring here.