India Art Fair 2024: CP Kukreja & Vishal Dar celebrate the architecture of JNU

CP Kukreja Foundation for Design Excellence shall be showcasing for the first time an exhibition on Jawaharlal Nehru University titled ‘The Masterplan’. Curated by Vishal Dar in India Art Fair 2024, the exhibition commemorates fifty years of the university, which was the monumental first commission of master architect CP Kukreja. This exhibition takes us through 4 chapters, where we witness the intersections between architecture, climate and nation-building, and engage with narratives that have shaped India and its publics.

The design of the exhibition is imagined as a studio inside a pavilion that is both didactic and experiential. We engage with the geology and its context with the architecture that inhabits it, and how the ecology and climate of this sanctuary is reflected in the devices that are employed by the architect to shape and align the built within the surroundings. The exhibition focuses on the emergence of the first South-Asian attempt in creating a vast university model – JNU – where an institution is imagined as a micro-city within the southern ridge of the Aravalli hills of New Delhi. Here, on these grounds, India would cultivate students who would learn to interact and dialogue with the world. The exhibition also brings forth into discussion, the role of the architect and his vision of architecture in nation building. Where most major universities of the world define their presence through the regimental and the classical forms of imposition, JNU’s MASTERPLAN, in its uniqueness, expresses an absence of the built. Date: 1st-4th February 2024 Timings: 11 AM- 7 PM Venue: NSIC Exhibition Grounds, Okhla, New Delhi