Beyond the Walls

When Indian artist and architect Martand Khosla was asked to create an online viewing room for Nature Morte, the New Delhi-based gallery that represents him, he was determined to do something different. He noticed that several art fairs and galleries were replicating spaces that already existed. ‘Some also commissioned more funky structures with exposed concrete, or these superbly imagined idealistic architectural scenarios with verdant landscapes,' Khosla says. ‘But I wasn't comfortable with that. I saw a whole new world had opened up, and that none of these spaces needed to really adhere to the rules of architecture as we know it.'

After a few months of research, he began to conceptualise a virtual environment free from the constraints of gravity or shifts in temperature or light. His starting point was the concept of a sketch.‘I was really attracted to the idea not only of the sketch as a testing ground with an uncertainty to it,' he says, ‘but also to the idea of the sketch holding within its form the true essence of what an idea for an architecture could be.'

What resulted was the first edition of the Possible Worlds project, which featured Indian artist Jitish Kallat's ethereal series of drawings titled Circadian Studies. Khosla hand-drew a series of fluid, expressive scribbles that serve as pavilions, which he then digitised. Set in a virtual landscape with a three-dimensional grid, each of these transparent pavilions showcases one of Kallat's drawings. Instead of creating a predetermined route directing viewers to each pavilion, Khosla invites them to move freely by clicking on various blue squares that are scattered across the space.

In early 2021,Khosla launched the second edition of the Possible Worlds project. Titled Deep Rivers Run Quiet, the viewing room features a series of mixed-media drawings by artist Reena Saini Kallat — Jitish Kallat's wife — that she made by tracing the borders of countries in conflict over the sharing of their waters. While creating the viewing room, Khosla was sensitive to the themes of Saini Kallat's work. ‘There's a nod to ideas of borders and separation,' he says, explaining that in the viewing room, parts of pavilions are separated and then shown pieced back together or certain parts of a pavilion are gouged out and can be viewed from a different orientation.

While the first edition of Possible Worlds was quite straightforward in terms of navigation, this one is more playful as Khosla has experimented with scale and orientation shifts. ‘To see some of the paintings you have to fly up into the air and look down onto the ground,' he says, adding that certain parts of the paintings and pavilion structures are shown at varying scales simultaneously. Unlike the first edition, there's a greater sense of unpredictability and whimsy.

Khosla plans to make future editions of Possible Worlds increasingly abstract and experimental, not necessarily including a logical, navigable grid but allowing for viewers to inhabit the space in unusual ways. He's also playing with the idea of turning his scribbled pavilions into actual sculptures. Working on imaginary architecture in a virtual world has opened new doors for him creatively. ‘It gives you infinite freedoms,' he says. ‘There is nothing that holds you back.'

Images courtesy of Reena Saini Kallat and Nature Morte, New Delhi This page, top and facing page Kallat’s Deep Rivers Run Quiet, 2020. Gouache, charcoal and Lumachrome blue lead on Arches paper and deckled edge handmade paper. 380 × 109 cm

Images by Martand Khosla This page, bottom Titled Possible Worlds, artist and architect Martand Khosla’s virtual viewing rooms detach art from the constraints of physical space or gravity. His second series of ‘virtual pavilions’ houses Reena Saini Kallat’s Deep Rivers Run Quiet exhibition