Worldly pleasures are fleeting… But what if we could put all our memories in a capsule of sorts and preserve them forever as an art masterpiece? That’s what we did at the two day pilot art event on July 14 and 15, aptly titled Memoir Bar.
Renowned for their exuberant, colourful, yet darkly humorous works in a dizzying range of media, Delhi based visual artists Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra in collaboration with Bharat Floorings & Tiles invited us to “deposit” our darkest memories as a form of emotional currency and redeem them as a piece of artistic tile.
The exhibition, hosted at Chatterjee & Lal gallery, was a witty and interactive exploration of the idea that emotions are multicoloured and can be preserved for good. On arrival, we were asked to write down a memory on a piece of paper along with our name, while selecting colours associated with that recollection. This piece of paper provided to us and other visitors mentioned six different emotions and colours allegorical to each other; for instance red colour for anger, blue for sadness, white for love etc.
We later shredded the paper in a pasta maker and tossed it in a tile mould. Using the fragmented paper and concrete in blue and white (colours related to the emotions we chose), we customised our own tile. Collectively, all the personalised tiles from visitors will be the starting point slated to travel to Dubai Design Week as “The emotional pavilion” in October 2016.
Recalling our engaging experience, we are puzzled whether to relegate the tiles as scrumptious marble cakes or a giant memory game hung on a wall. All the same, it is easy for us to say that reciprocal projects like Memoir Bar are more widely appreciated by not just art connoisseurs but also art dabblers because it separates a designed work from an art work for an end result that comes “naturally”. And we can’t wait for Thukral & Tagra’s next creative experience!
Website: www.thukralandtagra.com;
www.bharatfloorings.com; chatterjeeandlal.com
