Installation at the Lahore Fort for the Design Summit Lahore 2024

Field is conceived as an unenclosed territory that is both pavilion and grove, in between the two and neither. The repetition and particularity of the forms that constitute Field make direct associations with pillared halls and landscapes of trees, however, it is the dialogue with ideas and ideals of pleasure, of performativity rather than use, by which Field alludes to an encounter with places of seduction and play in Mughal architecture and to the serendipities of a wooded terrain.  Its location at the Lahore Fort generates a dialogue between old and new, between modern technology and centuries old craft, between light weight industrial materials and the heaviness and mass of the local construction, and between computer aided parametric design and human aided mathematical calculations.

Made primarily of steel in various profiles i.e. plates, pipes, sections and rods, the design generates spatial, visual, and atmospheric variation whilst maintaining a modular system. The surface of the metal changes from matt to reflective transforming the visual presence and weight of the material, while the shifting height of the structure helps determine areas of movement and pause.

An undulating plane suspended above the ground on a grid of vertical struts confronts the viewer’s gaze and forms a 3-dimensional canopy that is at times above the viewer’s eye level, at times below, and at times directly obstructing the line of sight. One hundred spherical configurations, each with a constellation of forty metal discs emanating from a central core, reflect the sky, the ground, and what is in between, subverting the visual presence of context, boundary and the material itself.

The four thousand reflective discs constitute a multitude of dissolving planes and perspective shifts as the viewer moves through Field. Configuring and reconfiguring a view that is multiplied and broken, its continuity disrupted by outlines and superimpositions, the discs form a constantly shifting mosaic that displaces, fragments and threatens the hold of normative experience.  The canopy appears fractal-like to contain repetition within repetition, of minutiae within the whole that adds a disjunctive, intangible component to the experience of space and the horizon against which it is held.

Field resists the idea of pleasure as spectacle by forcing a confrontation between the viewer and his or her line of sight. The viewer sees his or her own body in fragments- dispersed, multiplied, blurred, distorted and yet inescapably located within the image of the vista that is the object of the viewer’s gaze, from which the viewer’s body is ordinarily withheld. It is the act of looking that both imagines and disrupts the objectivity of the gaze, that subverts expectation, and that delivers the viewer’s gaze back to him or her as a distinct object.  The viewer becomes in effect immersed in Field, part of the vocabulary of a view perforated by fugitive images from other views, and a component of the consistently mobile mosaic from which it is constituted.

It is the sensitivity of Field to changes in the sky, to the movement of the sun, and the motion of the viewer’s body relative to thousands of angled planes, curvatures and distances, to contractions and expansions of perspective and view made possible through an array of simultaneous operations, which lends Field its multiple narratives.