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Orestes Hardy
At the heart of IN.DE Interior Architecture and Design is Sarita Krishnamurthy, our esteemed Principal and visionary force. With an eye for the exquisite and a passion for marrying form with function, Sarita has cultivated a design ethos that transcends the ordinary, offering our clients spaces that are not only breathtakingly beautiful but deeply personal. Her architectural expertise and refined aesthetic sensibility guide our mission to create interiors that reflect the very essence of elegance and individuality.
In 2001, Sarita further enriched her academic repertoire with studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, focusing on architecture. This period honed her ability to blend diverse architectural influences, shaping her into a designer with a truly global outlook.
Arthi has led some of our largest and most complex projects. Her work is most often mission-driven, where the architect must weigh social and civic impacts with architectural and environmental considerations. Design, for Arthi, is a compassionate act where elegant solutions align in the cooperative beliefs and systems of organizations. Skillful, adroit, smart, for Arthi, it comes down to her faith in people:
Arthi serves on the board of the Queens Museum, an institution dedicated to presenting the highest quality visual arts and educational programming for people in the New York metropolitan area, and particularly for the residents of Queens, a uniquely diverse, ethnic, cultural, and international community.
The book tackles questions related to the future of architecture and urbanism, lessons learned from global case studies and challenges related to interdisciplinary research, and critically examines what the future of buildings and cities will look like.
PK Well, it is a meaningful distinction, but that's the kind of distinction that I'd call into question. Whether a decision is a curatorial decision or an artistic decision or a design decision or just a decision that is conditioned by the space: all of those things coexist. There's no definitive way to tease out whose agency a particular decision is; those things are enmeshed.
PK Exactly. The signage is in Chinese and English, and there are shows that incorporate things that relate to Chinese culture in particular ways. It's true that the majority of people that end up coming here probably are from more or less the same cultural space, but then there are also always people that just stop outside. If people stop outside, even if they don't make it through the door, the space still does something. And that's important to me.
PK That's definitely the goal, but rather than having them be purely separate, we'd collapse the distinctions between them somehow. At the opening of Permutation 03.4: Re-Mix, you could think we were a club, or something. Thomas Brinkmann was playing these records on a sound system and people were dancing, for an hour and a half or two, and there were a lot of people there purely because they were techno fans, who heard that Thomas Brinkmann was in town, and they came and they were excited. That kind of encounter is good. If we keep bringing different audiences in, and they encounter other things they might not have seen in their native context, then I think the space is doing what it wants to do.
ZS It sounds like your role as the organizer is to create a place where this can happen. In one press release, I remember you say you seek, "to emphasize rupture over tranquility, and interference over mere coexistence," which in turns reminds me of an Experimental Jetset quote, something like, "design ought to perforate the thing it communicates."
ZS It seems like lately there's been a return to designing exhibitions in opposition to the white cube. Or as with Thomas Demand's La Carte d'Aprs Nature and the recreation of the 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form in Venice last year, there's a lot more focus on the relationship between the space and the object. Does that feel like it's an emerging impulse?
PK When I started doing this, I wasn't thinking of it as coming from any particular place, except being a certain curatorial idea, and also a certain idea of how things were going to speak to each other. But I think you're right that one could definitely speak to related approaches in Venice this year. The idea that there are these juxtapositions between works and contexts with totally different intentions, and in being put into a space they start to create a third term. That's very much in the air now. Of course that's what graphic designers have been doing for a long time. If you're Richard Hollis designing Ways of Seeing, or any designer making a book, you're thinking about how to put together these essentially disparate forms: text and image, images of different contexts, and trying to create a thing that places them meaningfully within a space. And so I'd say that the classic tenet of graphic design is this sort of juxtaposition. Maybe it's just that it goes in and out of vogue in a curatorial sense. There are moments when one thinks more about the autonomy of the object or the autonomy of the artist, and there are moments when one thinks more about the interrelationship of objects. For example, when you're talking about re-installation of When Attitudes Become Form in Venice, that's one of the things you see. You see that, when Harald Szeemann put together the original show, the works are really on top of each other. There are these spaces where you can barely even walk through them, and maybe you think, "Oh that wouldn't even pass ADA requirements at any museum in the US." Of course in those cases it's more often than not that the neighboring objects are "like" each other. . . But I think there's still a different sense than if you're going to a show where the idea is that it is an entire space, or the work should somehow be isolated and create its own sui generis context.
PK There was a conversation that happened in Art Basel last year that outlined for me a major difference between my approach and that of a more traditional gallery model. There was a panel about mega-galleries, and a New York gallerist was saying how, as with any small business, he has to think about his clients. And his clients are artists and collectors. And he seemed to say that critical voices, like writers or the press or whatever, weren't his audience. So I asked, how do you feel about a broader public, or a different public? The response: That's not my job, to speak to a broader public. Obviously, with this project I too am speaking to a certain art and design discourse. But it's important to me that people walking by, seeing this work in the store window, don't necessarily know it's an artwork, but they look at it. Both in design, and in curating, it's a Brechtian estrangement, instead of the medium being presented as totally transparent and disappearing. It's going to affect what it's mediating one way or the other, there's no other way that it could be.
PK Right, it can either pretend that production doesn't exist, or it can acknowledge that it does, and be straightforward about it. And I would hope to be straightforward about the fact that things are being mediated one way or the other.
ZS One line in description of the Permutation 03.x caught my eye: "multiples of a religious or political icon extend their reach and efficacy, whereas a duplicated file, painting, handbag, or cityscape violates legal and ethical strictures. Questions of capital and power lie at the core: who owns the original versus who is producing the copy." Is there a specific politics implicit in the curatorial attitude, or merely the existence of politics within this context?
PK No, there's very explicitly a politics. Part of the space is also about asking questions about commerce and culture and how intertwined those things are. In the case of this show, it's been evoked in a number of different ways. In the previous show in the cycle [Permutation 03.3], Peter Rostovsky was showing digital paintings that are distributed for free online. There was a pamphlet that we produced with him, a new text, a dialogue about painting and politics, and the question of how to create a mass-produced, democratic artwork, that's neither kitsch nor something that's elite. This came out of Peter's involvement with the Occupy movement and the contradictions it raises for artists. Such questions about distribution, and democracy are pretty intrinsic to everything we do here.
The reason that I'm interested in looking into models outside of the white cube is not just because I'm interested in breaking some norm; it's because the white cube exists to create a certain kind of value. It exists to generate a certain kind of object, to sanctify it. Display is an important and powerful thing but it's often not acknowledged. Of course it works very differently in a commercial sphere. But in any case I'm interested in making that thing apparent. It's a kind of self-reflexivity about display and how it produces value as much as it is also about the things being shown.
After all so much of normal gallery discourse is about access to knowledge. You typically have a person who sits behind a desk somewhere, and they hold the checklist and the press release. You walk in and there a lot of things on the wall, and there's nothing that tells you what they are. If you want to know what they are, you go up and get a press release. I had a strange encounter the other day. I was talking to a performing arts institution about a project, and they asked me if there was admission to the shows here, and that made me realize there's a total gulf there. We go to galleries, we're conversant in the norms. We know that if we want information, we go and ask for the checklist. If we're dressed well enough, we can ask for a price list. We know these modes and we navigate them fluidly. But the truth is many people don't. My parents walk into a gallery, they have no idea what you do there. Unless there's a wall label, they don't know who it's by, they don't know they're allowed to ask somebody. In fact the whole point of the person behind the desk seems to be to scare you into not wanting to ask.
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