The engineering of rubble

Cureated by Jasone Miranda-Bilbao and Vaibhav Raj Shah

Participating artist are, Ali Glover, Ana Genovés, Charo Garaigorta, Damien Meade, Ian Dawson, Ian Gouldstone, Katrin Hanush, Mike Marshall, Oona Grimes, Robin Magannity, Sarah Staton.

Thapar Contemporary’s inaugural programme unfolds through two parallel events: the exhibition The Engineering of Rubble, presented at Thapar gallery, and a new iteration of SupaStore, a site-specific project by London-based artist Sarah Staton, installed in the grounds of Bikaner House.

To engineer rubble is to take the remnants of destruction and give them coherence while preserving their brokenness. This is not an act of repair, but an observation of incompleteness. It implies an acceptance of imperfection as something creative and generative. What can be rebuilt when form itself has been destroyed?

Each fragment, twisted beam or broken surface, carries an echo of the form it once belonged to. New surfaces are revealed and an openness emerges. This is an art not concerned with closure but with a release where beauty is not found in unity, but in persistence.

The works in this exhibition occupy a fragile space between gravity and air. They invite us to consider how disorder might be allowed to play without the demand for resolution. From what is broken, we learn an acceptance of the incomplete, and from loss we learn presence. These are works that move slowly, go back and forth, are filled with pauses and reconsiderations. Yet within those pauses, a deeper architecture appears. One built not of walls, frames, plinths or screens, but of patient attention. To engineer rubble, in this sense, is to practice the art of reorganising chaos gently. The fractured and incomplete speak of matter’s quiet will to endure even after its purpose has dissolved. We encounter the grace of things that have broken and chosen, somehow, to remain.