Sculpting Air

Sculpture has divine realms in our society. We in the Indian subcontinent through generations have seen an interplay between the divine and the conceptual. Sculpture and Architecture get mentioned together within the ‘Shilpa Shastras’ a group of texts existing from a time before the Vedas that stipulate design, shape, proportion and materiality of temple sculpture and architecture.

A sthapathi can be an architect and a sculptor. Our caste system forced our artists and artisans to only excel in their talent to the trade they were forced to ply. They could not innovate in form or materiality but our constitution brought freedoms of expression and  today the realm of sculpture has responded to our diversities of culture, faith, region and language. Saloni Doshi’s collection of sculpture begins with the antiquities gathering objects, brackets and yalis, as well as  Burmese boxes, footstools and pieces of veneration. It briefly encounters modernism and then holds a vast genre of contemporary sculpture from South Asia through her acts of collecting and the residency program at her institution, Space 118. 

‘Sculpting Air’ holds the presence of what we call sculpture and its absence.  The audience is made aware of the concept of sculpture and they author their experiences with these inanimate objects as artistic acts of perception.  At the Chidambaram temple in Tamil Nadu there is an empty shrine where a formless lingam exists of Shiva representing one of the five elements or ‘pancha-bootha’. This is the ‘Akasha Lingam’ or the lingam that represents the sky.  Shaivites present rituals to this deity believing in its formless form.  In a realm of ideas where we have the freedom to think, we can sculpt with air as long as we are willing to experiment with the etymological definition of sculpture itself, bringing forth new forms and material.  

Sumesh Sharma, Dakar, 2024