Rathin Barman's practice places architecture as a nodal axis and uses other disciplines in conjunction to expand from that plane yet keeping a continuous increasing or decreasing distance from the centrality of architecture that manifests as a form of expression. Simultaneity and dimensional distortion, therefore lies at the crux of Barman's approach to the built environment.
Through a series of sculptures that employ materials such as concrete, metal, reinforced concrete board and brass, Barman carves a space between the physical, narrative and aspirational in his project. An imposing concrete wall sculpture inlaid with brass forms a drawing of a home culled from interviewing families that have occupied old homes for decades, sometimes reconstructed from visits to these sites over years and at times expanded from recollecting structures that once existed. Interspersed are three-dimensional reinforced concrete board works that are made from narrative aspirations of people who strive to move into other modular forms of housing and leave behind a past grandeur of a large structure of co-habitation. For Barman, architecture is anthropology, history, poetry and psychology operating at the same time.
Barman's project functions like an open loop almost akin to a spiral – conceptually, visually and materially viewed like a curve which emanates from a single point of entry into the curve, yet by simultaneously adopting other disciplines, it moves farther away as it revolves around that initial point of entry. At the same time, the relative spirality of his approach to the built environment allows Barman the possibility to collapse his work back to that starting central point of architecture.
Press release courtesy Experimenter.
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