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Bijoy Jain’s studio in Mumbai is a courtyard home in the Byculla neighbourhood of Mumbai. Behind a discreet gate is a long treelined corridor with his home on one side and neighbours’ homes on the other, all doors and windows opening into this communal corridor. Through another bamboo door, one arrives at a wide, open, voluminous courtyard in the middle with work spaces lined along the periphery. Desks, chairs, cabinets; arrangements of found rocks; vats of indigo, bowls of bright ferrous pigments, drawings, paintbrushes; books, more books; people weaving a chair so adeptly, effortlessly, with threads of muga silk; Jain’s beautiful black dogs running around; and the monsoon pouring down on that day of September, loud and relentless—every thing belongs, everyone rather, animate or not, found or made, like parts of a civilization, an ecosystem, an atmosphere that is Studio Mumbai.
Almost a decade ago, Hervé Chandès, artistic managing director of Fondation Cartier, had come across a photograph of Studio Mumbai in a magazine. “It fascinated me. It was rich with possibilities, of creation, of people, of aesthetic, of invention. I kept the magazine nearby, like a talisman, to meet again sometime,” he told us over a phone call from Paris.
Eventually, in March 2022, the Fondation Cartier formally invited Bijoy Jain to create and curate an exhibition at the Fondation’s Jean Nouvel–designed building. Titled Breath of an Architect, it opened on 9 December 2023 and goes on till 21 April 2024.
Bijoy Jain at Fondation Cartier
As one studies Jain’s architectural practice of almost 30 years, reflects on his craft, his manner, his language, or, without knowing anything about him, just gazes at the deep, dark indigo moon painted on a Karvi panel made from earth and cow pat—inspired by a water trough at Japanese weaver Chiaki Maki’s weaving centre in Dehradun in northern India—it emerges that it is rarely ever about isolated, disconnected parts of individual projects. It’s one long continuum and Jain is living and working within some kind of a reverberation between points.
Breath of an Architect is very much in the same orbit. “Everything that is present is made from one’s breath. It applies to each of us because we too are made from one’s breath,” he says. He invites the viewer to experience silence, a word that was seminal in early discussions with Chandès and the Fondation team. “I think the function of the work is to evoke that silence. But it is not a lack of sound, it is a sound which is full in itself,” he says, hopeful that viewers “ will bring their presence, and being there, dissolve.”
While one could be intrigued by the physical agglomeration of objects—bamboo, stone, wood, brick, pigments and earth—a silent osmosis leads to an intuitive connection as elements interact with each other, talking in a language of material, proportions, origins and journeys, and a timeless existence. It is quite abstract to define but is easily felt—an experience that is at once familiar and unknown.
“Bijoy has a talent for making materials speak,” Chandès had said over the phone. “The other person who I observed who could do this was Issey Miyake.” It is also important to note that in the entire exhibit, not a single work has been made with any machine—not a drill, not a nail. Everything is made by hand—sliced, sponged, painted, woven, etc. Jain’s haptic instinct is a marker of his architectural practice as well as this particular series of works.
Established in Paris in 1984, Fondation Cartier is located in a beautiful glass building designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. Over the years, the Fondation has presented a series of exhibitions, dialogues and collaborations with contemporary architects, including Junya Ishigami from Japan, Diller Scofidio from the US, Freddy Mamani from Bolivia, Mauricio Rocha from Mexico, and Solano Benitez and Gloria Cabral from Paraguay. This invitation to Bijoy Jain—the first Indian architect—comes as a part of this series.
Over the years, Chandès’s subsequent experiences of Jain’s works all led to this point of the invitation. “I saw his work at the Venice Biennale, the one that [Alejandro] Aravena curated. Space, geometry, colour— again, it was rich with possibilities. It was pure beauty for me. Then a few years later, I saw his work in Paris. Suddenly a chair became an homage to something, a celebration of something, of civilization perhaps, something without date,” recalls Chandès. “This show is total creation. It’s a deep commitment and everything is created for the Fondation,” he adds.
On being asked, What are you doing for this exhibition?, Jain, in his classic, specific way, fine-tunes the question to, “Rather, what I do every day?” “My pedagogy is architecture. But if I ask myself what that encompasses, at the core, it is about making space. Once you get past the bells and whistles, finally it has to reside in the notion of inhabiting space.”
His creative response to the Fondation’s invitation (and to the Jean Nouvel building) reflects this very way of thinking. “The entire point of this exercise is as if we’re just passing through space and time. On one hand, it’s transient, momentary. The exhibit may last for one or three or five months—that’s just nomenclature for the amount of time given, time inhabited. But if you think of it as an intuitive thought embedded in unknown time—it’s not logic or knowledge; it is not the past, present or future—then it is about something that is ever present, always there, you just have to tune into it,” explains Jain.
What the exhibition might evoke in each visitor is wholly their own, but for Bijoy himself, he recalls the first time that he came upon the Jean Nouvel building of Fondation Cartier in Paris. “I was driving past, and I saw a giant vitrine in a forest. It was transparent, not because it’s made of glass, but because there was no building. Everything had collapsed into a singular entity; whether it was the birds or plants or people or glass, it was all flattened but it was voluminous, the inside, outside, all of it synthesized as one.”
Today, as he inhabits the “giant vitrine” with his own thoughts and presence and works, he is looking forward to that same fleeting but ever-present moment. “I’m curious to experience what I saw then. I hope for that synthesis,” he says.