VISHAL K DAR
Born in 1976, Vishal K Dar lives and works in Gurgaon, India. He received his B’Arch from Sushant School of Art and Architecture in 1999, and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002.
Dar is known for site-specific projects that deploy computer programmed lights in large-scale abandoned sites. His works simultaneously invoke the vastly mythic and deeply personal by creating experience territories with digital technologies, architecture and earthly elements. His works have been exhibited across the country and internationally, including solo and group exhibitions in Delhi, Mumbai, London, the US, Brazil, Hong Kong and Germany. In 2016, he created a site-specific work, titled Storm Deities for the 11th Shanghai Biennale. In 2017, Dar was part of a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California. He also curated several exhibitions between 2005 and 2013.
About The Work
Courtesy of the artist, New Delhi
Vishal K. Dar was invited to create a work that would activate the long, narrow entrance corridor that leads to the two courtyards of the building. Upon visiting the site, he was impressed with the linear vertical perspective of the space, offering an architectural compression that would create deep shadows. His work, entitled SOL (Spanish for Sun), is a sculptural intervention into the space, a composite of circular geometries that have been extruded along the linear path of the corridor, perched on the parapet, in dialogue with the elongated slice of sky that is visible to the visitor from below.
For Dar, SOL represents a floating observatory, one deeply rooted in and inspired by Sawai Jai Singh’s astronomical observatories built in five cities of northern India.As the viewer looks up, the sculpture becomes a dialogue between himself and the sky, bisected by the path of the sun. The rays of the sun get caught in the slivers of mirrored steel and there the sculpture becomes a clock, an object that will change its appearance as the sun moves through the sky during the course of the day. At night, the sculpture will vanish, becoming a shadow of itself.