Nataraj Sharma’s monumental installation Constructs (2008-15) captures the frenzied dreams of the emerging middle-class that keep Indian cities under perpetual construction. The installation resembles modern high-rise apartment buildings left midway under construction, allegorising the unending cycle of urban decay and regeneration.

Unusual sculptural materials such as cast and welded mild steel are used to explore contemporary urban units of manufacture. An idea of insatiable industrialisation and unrestrained urbanisation at the cost of depleting natural resources, also reminds one of the excess of modernisation often called ‘junk-spaces’. The welded balconies, hollow unfinished windows and wiry texture of patterned grills are moulded within frames of the structure appear to be superfluous decorative features. Rendering the naked scaffolds that allow endless replication of prototypes, the artist alludes to city structures that keep rising higher, stopping for nothing, even when the project of modernity is proven as misdirected or obsolete.