From December 9, 2023 to April 21, 2024, the Cartier Foundation for contemporary art unveils "The Breath of the Architect", a tailor-made exhibition designed exclusively for the institution by Bijoy Jain, the visionary architect at the head of Studio Mumbai in India. Famous for his deep commitment to the connection between humanity and nature, Jain crafts work where time and gesture take center stage. By examining the complex links between art, architecture and substance, it offers the Cartier Foundation an integral creation: a dreamlike and contemplative space in harmonious dialogue with the emblematic structure designed by Jean Nouvel.
Date: from December 9, 2023 to April 21, 2024
Location: Cartier Foundation
Desire: Paris, immersive experience, sensory, humanity, urban planning, architecture
Bijoy Jain designs an event that feels like a physical and sentimental experience.
The breath of the architect offers explorers an authentic incentive to inhale, to stroll in complete serenity, to rediscover tranquility: " Silence has a sound, we hear it resonating within us. This sound connects all living beings. It is the breath of life. It is synchronous in each of us. Silence, time and space are eternal, just like water, air and light, which are our elemental construct. This abundance of sensory phenomena, dreams, memory, imagination, emotions and intuition comes from this reservoir of experiences, anchored in the corners of our eyes, in the soles of our feet, in the lobe of our ears, in the tone of our voice, in the murmur of our breath and in the palms of our hands."
Bringing together darkness and light, lightness and gravity, wood, brick, earth, rock or even aqua, the architect shapes a sensory journey, in harmony with the substance. Designed according to the rhythm of breathing and developed manually, the exhibition reveals an installation made up of pieces of architecture.
Sculptures chiseled in rock or terracotta, facades of vernacular Indian residences, coated panels, traces of pigments traced with precision, bamboo structures borrowing their inspiration from tazias - funerary monuments carried during Shiite Muslim processions in memory of a saint - these ephemeral and transitional buildings reveal a universe that is both limitless and intimate, transporting us to places as close as they are distant.
At the suggestion of Hervé Chandès, curator of the exhibition and artistic director of the Fondation Cartier, Bijoy Jain also invites the Chinese artist living in Beijing HU Liu and the ceramist of Turkish origin living in Paris Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye . By emphasizing the ritual mastery of gesture, resonance and dialogue with substance, these three artists share a common ethos and sensitivity. HU Liu's black monochrome compositions are entirely shaped in graphite, by the repetition of the same movement, in order to reveal the essence of natural elements such as grass caressed by the wind, the movement of waves or the silhouette of branches of a tree. Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye's ceramics, both in suspension and in weightlessness, also result from great manual skill and an intensive dialogue with the earth.
For Bijoy Jain, the physical world we inhabit is a palimpsest of our cultural evolution. Humanity crosses a constantly evolving landscape, whose successive writings intertwine.
"The breath of the architect" seeks to offer a glimpse, however fleeting, of the sensoriality emanating from architecture, of the intuitive force that binds us to the elements, and of our emotional relationship to space.
Date: from December 9, 2023 to April 21, 2024
Location: Cartier Foundation
Desire: Paris, immersive experience, sensory, humanity, urban planning, architecture
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