MEASURES OF SILENCE

Dia Mehhta Bhupal's constructed sets evoke absent presences and textural depth, states Sandhya Bordewekar.

- Sandhya Bordewekar

Dia Mehhta Bhupal painstakingly creates ‘interiorscapes’ in real time and space, many of which take a year or more to build. She then photographs these forms. The constructed set-pieces function as installation art and the images capture their status as objects that frame the processes that have gone into their making.

Dia studied photography at the Parsons School of Design in New York from 2003 to 2006 but always wanted to go beyond the traditional norms that define the practice. “I was interested,” she says, “in presenting what we already know to be real, albeit with a particular tension: spaces that we know to be brimming with bodies are left entirely empty here. What does it mean to be presented with a topography of absence?”

Dia’s art practice draws from imagining and creating, redefining and recalibrating everyday images in photographs. Once she constructs an image in her head, Dia creates it in her studio at a life-size scale with tightly rolled tubes of paper torn out of old magazines; each element is carefully constructed, cleanly articulated and detailed. There is a kind of a missing presence here – as if the image and the space were inhabited in the past or anticipate occupation in the future. She adds, “In a world saturated with manipulated or mediated images, my work re-evaluates the potential of the photographic medium. The images do not simply depict the world around me but actively participate in its construction.”