Talks

Research as Practice 2.2

Believing in Materials
A Lecture by Sankalpa

11 March 2022, 6:00 pm IST

Zoom Webinar ID: 897 9632 1754
Live on Zoom, Facebook & YouTube

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art presents the second segment of the online lecture series ‘Research as Practice’ titled Crafting Thought. This session features a lecture by architect and academic Sankalpa, moderated by Annapurna Garimella. It will explore how Sankalpa thinks through the commitment to the vibrancy of materials, to research as architectural practice and the studio as the space of pedagogic labour.

This event is part of a set of six sessions conceptualized and moderated by Annapurna Garimella that take the idea of research in practice to explore how scholars, curators, publishers, and artists reflect on the way they think and shape an enquiry. Thought has to be continually and skillfully crafted and re-crafted as they engage archives, forms of art and new information. How do practitioners do this? Conversations, modes of research output and engagement with art publics evolve while people, life and world events shift. Thought is immaterial and often evanescent but to gain gravity as an idea and then seed an enquiry, it must be crafted. In the crafting of research practices, accident, intuition, intention, will, desire and fear play important roles. The conversations in this set seek to engage committed practitioners in a discussion about how they work to think. 

KNMA initiated the ‘Research as Practice’ lecture series in February 2021, and has welcomed the likes of Hammad Nasar, Grant Watson, Nida Ghouse, Saira Ansari and Alexander Keefe. The series invites researchers, curators and artists to share and discuss their individual research practices, inventive forms and manifestations of research. It attempts to address the complexities of research-forms, be it as ‘research-exhibition’, creative research, curatorial, artistic or post-institutional research, or artworks as knowledge-systems. This program is conceptualised and organised by Akansha Rastogi, Senior Curator, KNMA.

Sankalpa is a practicing architect and an academic. He has been teaching at the Faculty of Architecture CEPT University (Ahmedabad, India) since 2008. He is the co-founder of 'thumbimpressions', a collaborative practice involved in the design and detailing with concern on environment and the labor of making. Recent work emerging from his practice like Yogashala, Prapanna, and Dhum residence demonstrate the ability to bridge the expression of material in a seamless relationship between program and structure. His current areas of research include development of details for an emerging aesthetics of coming together of industrial & natural material in the wake of environmental crisis. He has conducted workshops and lectured widely on bamboo as a construction material. He is one of the founding members of the India Bamboo Forum and a lifetime member of Bamboo Society of India.

Annapurna Garimella is an art historian and designer who researches medieval Indic architecture and visual and built cultures in India after Independence. She heads Art, Resources and Teaching, a research library dedicated to projects and teaching in the visual, built and performing arts and Jackfruit Research and Design, which specialises in research and curation for the arts. Her recent books are the co-edited The Contemporary Hindu Temple (Marg, 2019) and the upcoming The Long Arc of South Asian Art in honour of art historian Vidya Dehejia (Women Unlimited, 2022). Digesting the Past: The Discourse of Sacralized Architectural Renovation in Southern India is her manuscript in preparation.