Jesal Kapadia: A vacant rectangle, left blank for a work
expressing modern feeling, digital archival prints, sizes - variable,
2008-09.
A vacant
rectangle, left blank for a work expressing modern feeling is a mute
testimony to the city of Chandighar in North India, designed and built by le
Corbusier in the 1950’s. The title of the piece comes from Le Corbusier’s book The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning
(1937). The series of photographs reveal glossy pages from books on
Chandighar that are preserved in the vast Le Corbusier archives all over the
world, and documents of how Le Corbusier’s cement and steel buildings endure in
the otherwise rural landscape despite failing as a modernist utopia – a vestige
of a canon fallen into irony. It looks backward at the lineage of utopian city
planning in India by idiosyncratically connecting it with the evolution of
Indian cities.
Jesal Kapadia was born in
Bombay India, where she studied Commercial Arts and worked as a graphic
designer. She moved to Amherst, Massachusetts in 1996, where she completed her
MFA. She is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, and serves as
a co-art editor for Rethinking Marxism
since 2003.
Since 2004, she has been working collectively with members of the
16beavergroup, an artist community that functions as a social and collaboration
space. Recent artistic projects and
exhibitions include: ‘Ditto or the same as what has been said’ for the
Guangzhou triennial in China; ‘A vacant rectangle left blank for a work
expressing modern feeling’ (shown in ‘Properly past’ an exhibition at Rotunda
Gallery); ‘The Laughing Club’ (part of a traveling show for the Dalai Lama
Peace Project); collaborations with 16beavergroup for October magazine; and
‘Setting in Motion’ (a project co-curated with Susan Jahoda for Rethinking
Marxism 2006). Publications include ‘Act Patriot Act’ together with
16beavergroup and ‘Telegraph’ a newspaper including text written by Yates
Mckee, commissioned by Art in General. Her work has been shown widely, including the New
York South Asian Arab Film Festival, Magic Lantern Cinema in Providence, Experimenta
Film Festival in Mumbai, SENI International Visual Arts Festival in Singapore,
Contemporary Arts Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, MIT’s Media Test Wall,
Cambridge, Momenta Art in Brooklyn, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Vera List Center
for Arts and Politics.
