Rajesh Vora : Everyday Monuments - the Rooftop Sculptures of Punjab

Striking photography and incisive texts document and reflect on the fascinating and uniquely Punjabi art form of sculptural water tanks.

In the late 1970s, a unique local art form emerged in the villages of Doaba, a rural region of India’s Punjab state. Villagers who had moved elsewhere but retained close ties to the region began constructing elaborate multi-storey homes of brick or marble, topped with sculptural watertanks, sometimes called “showpieces.” Though almost unknown outside of India, in certain areas of the Punjab today homes like these dominate the landscape. The painted cement-and-rebar embellishments are usually individually commissioned, and take various forms including planes, animals, soccer balls, and weightlifters; in all cases, their intent is to announce and honor a family or individual’s presence in and connection to the region. Combined with the intricately decorated houses on which they perch, these works represent a merging of art, architecture, and everyday life that transcends conventional design norms to tell a diasporic story in a form that is unique to Punjab.

Mumbai-based photographer Rajesh Vora visited 150 villages over several years to photograph hundreds of these works. In 2022, his photos were exhibited at the Surrey Art Gallery in British Columbia, Canada, a major center of the Punjabi diaspora. In addition to over 140 of Vora’s photographs, this volume offers texts by Rahul Mehrotra, who observes the hybrid and evolving conceptions of home that these vernacular forms express; Vora and Keith Wallace, the exhibition’s curator, who discuss the origins of the works and their travels in the region; Sajdeep Soomal, who locates the sculptures’ “dreams of technological modernity” on a trajectory flowing from the region’s agricultural past through to its independence from British colonization; and Satwinder Kaur Bains, who reflects on the nuanced and complex evocations that these photos tease from her own experience of migration.

Rajesh Vora is a Mumbai-based photographer focused primarily on architectural and cultural subject matter. He graduated in 1979 from the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, where he developed an interest in documenting peoples and regions that are threatened by change. His architectural photography has appeared in Domus (India), Architectural Design (India), Inside Outside, Dezeen, ArchDaily, and COLORS, where he contributed for fifteen years as a photographer, researcher, and writer. His documentary photos have appeared in numerous publications, most recently Kinetic City & Other Essays (2021), Working in Mumbai: RMA Architects (2020), and The Architecture of I. M. Kadri (2016). He has exhibited photographs in group shows in New Delhi, the Canary Islands, The Netherlands, France, and the United States. His ongoing personal project, Everyday Baroque, first appeared as a solo exhibition in 2016 at PHOTOINK, New Delhi. This project was reconceived as Everyday Monuments in 2022 for Surrey Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada.

Keith Wallace has been a curator of contemporary art since 1979. For ten years he was curator, then director/curator, of the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, where he developed a program of regional, national, and international exhibitions. As an independent curator, he organized exhibitions for the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (Reality Check); the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Resonance: Contemporary Art from New Delhi, with Anita Dube and Subodh Gupta); and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto (Stretch, co-curated with Eugenio Valdés Figueroa). For seven years he was associate director/curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. From 2004 to 2020, Wallace was editor-in-chief of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art published by ARTCO, Taipei.

Dr. Satwinder Kaur Bains is Director of the South Asian Studies Institute and an associate professor of Culture, Media, and Society Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada. Her critical analysis of India’s multilingual policy and planning has fuelled her interest in studying the impact of language, culture, and identity on South Asian Canadian migration, settlement, and integration. Her widely published research includes and intersects cross-cultural education with a focus on anti-racist curriculum implementation; race, racism, and ethnicity; identity politics; Sikh feminist ideology; migration and the South Asian Canadian diaspora; and Punjabi Canadian cultural historiography. Her scholarship, extensive community service, and work with various organizations have earned her numerous awards for her commitment to social justice, preservation of histories and cultural knowledge, and women’s rights.

Rahul Mehrotra is the principal founder of RMA Architects in Mumbai, as well as professor of Urban Design and Planning and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 2014, Mehrotra has been a member of the International Committee of Architectural Critics. Mehrotra’s many publications and exhibitions include, most recently, The Kinetic City & Other Essays (2021); Working in Mumbai: RMA Architects (2020); The State of Housing: Realities, Aspirations and Imaginaries in India (Gallery MMB, 2018; co-curated with Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta); Ephemeral Urbanism: Does Permanence Matter? (2017; with Felipe Vera); and The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India (2016).

Sajdeep Soomal is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto, where he is working through science and technology studies, histories of political consciousness and madness, and contemporary art practices within and beyond South Asia. Sajdeep currently works as a research assistant at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where he helps coordinate acquisitions, conduct collections research, and organize public programming for the Kapany Collection of Sikh Art. He serves as the chairperson of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), a collective member of Sanghum Film, and a programming committee member of InterAccess. Sajdeep has previously conducted oral historical research and digital archiving projects for the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), The ArQuives, and the Family Camera Network. He holds a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto.