Shrine Empire will present an experimental project at Art Dubai. Arun Dev’s spatio-temporal futurisms of urban architecture will dialogue with Shruti Mahajan’s approach to spaces as being imbued with personal histories and remembered dimensions of homes left behind. The collision of the temporal disjunctures between both their practices will hope to generate new meanings in our collective relationship with built structures. Dialoguing with this presentation will be another trio, Baaraan Ijlal and Moonis Ijlal and Divya Singh. Baaraan Ijlal’s archival practice has consistently been preoccupied with the connotations of power and politics. Her work acts as a witness against erasure of people and history. Moonis is interested in the psychology of form and spaces and their impacts of inclusivity and alienation. His aesthetics is informed with the phenomenon of hybridity and evolution found in nature and impacts of social human evolution on biodiversity.

Divya Singh on the other hand is concerned with the poetics of space, especially in the ways that they interact with time, light and darkness to yield to considerations on isolation and mortality, almost as if the spaces that she engages with are portals. The pairs of artists will be in conversation for several months leading up to Art Dubai while working on their individual projects to reveal tangential encounters and relationalities between their engagement with architecture, informing and inspiring each other with the skyline as a prompt. The skyline in the presented works become the interface between built structures and the limitless, undivided sky open to numerous possibilities, hope and the cosmos. This project will also be an experiment in what artistic camaraderie can offer, and how each artist with relatable interests in their practice may enrich each others’ perspectives, from futuristic architectures and rooftops between Shruti Mahajan and Arun Dev, the heritage

structures that bleed history into the sky in Baaraan and Moonis Ijlal's works, as well as the teleportations from interior spaces to the cosmos in Divya Singh's work.

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