About the project: SOAK is an exhibition that explores alternative ways to visualise Mumbai's terrain, aimed at recovering and inventing ways of inhabiting Mumbai as a monsoon and estuarial landscape. The clients were artist/author/architect duo Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha with the National Gallery of Modern Arts, India, who initiated SOAK as a public exhibition and book.

I was involved with the team at Trapeze, Bangalore to design this exhibition. The aesthetics was aimed to create an ambience of the ever expanding urban landscape of Mumbai that eventually tipped the balance of nature and led to catastrophes. This exhibition design project was comprehensive and involved lots of team effort, foresight and planning, also giving me the opportunity to interact with experts of the field and many other interesting people.

My role: Exhibition design being one of the most versatile fields of design, like architecture, I got to play around everything, including materials & processes / structural design / graphics / space / light and sound. I assisted in the planning and managing the space for the panels, creating scaled down as well as 1:1 mock ups of the panels. Materials used for the final models were corrugated sheets, and powder coated 6mm iron meshes which were joined by specially designed hooks and screws.

A wonderful experience.

Below are the images of the exhibition, the initial drawings and model.