PC1:GS:PtP

Portals to Play 

Adam Nathaniel Furman

Ana Kostova

Sameer Kulavoor

A curated vision of a utopian city council designed city
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This is an exhibition I’ve dreamt about for years. At its heart are Adam Nathaniel Furman and Sameer Kulavoor, two artists I’ve had the pleasure to collaborate with across projects and continents as part of SqW:Lab. Their visual languages - joyful, critical, and deeply rooted in place, feel like cousins. Add to this mix the abstractive spatial work of Ana Kostova, and you have the makings of a perfect trio, a celebration of colour, architecture, and the possibility of public space as stage.

"My work might initially seem architectural, but the deeper question is about the human condition. "
Sameer Kulavoor

The imagined exhibition takes as its starting point existing architectural ornamentation, such as Indian wedding gates, Adam’s “New London Fabulous,” Ana’s delicate spatial thresholds, and asks: What if this were the city we lived in? A place where colour doesn’t just decorate, it liberates. Where joy is built into the foundations.

I’d ask the artists to collaborate on an immersive installation, fusing their styles into a walkable fantasia of archways, interior-scapes, sculptural seating, façades, and faceted doorways. Visitors might enter through one of Sameer’s grand gateways, pause on Adam’s hybrid furniture-architecture pieces, or pass through Ana’s translucent, dreamlike constructions.
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Each artist also creates drawings, paintings and digital collages, and I’d want to show these works too, either in a maximalist salon hang or layered across custom wallpaper that blends their works into one continuous surface: a city on top of a city, stories stacked like scaffolding or high-rise blocks of flats.

This is a show, ultimately, of hope. A speculative celebration, a portal through the grey urban everyday into a world built from colour, joy, generosity, and a touch of Alice-in-Wonderland logic.

“Architecture is the stage set on which we live our lives.”
Hugh Casson

​PlanChest1: chairs, corridors, corners, curtains, portals to play, after the instruction
​​PlanChest2: Louise Lawler, Vishwa Shroff, Ralph Rugoff, Kobby Adi, john ros
PlanChest 3: gallery seating, vitrines, four rooms, drawing the gallery