Fractured Orbit

Fractured Orbit is a site-specific installation inspired by Jaipur as a city originally conceived through cosmic order, where urban space was designed in alignment with the rhythms of the universe. This idea, together with Charles Correa’s use of the mandala as a way of translating cosmology into lived architectural environments, shaped the conceptual foundation of the work. Developed within the context of the Gyan Museum, a place dedicated to timekeeping and material memory, the installation reflects on how far contemporary culture has moved from these principles of balance and orientation.

The circle is central to the work as a symbol of cycles: of time, nature, consumption, and return. In Fractured Orbit, the circular form evokes both cosmic motion and the repetitive systems humans have created to measure, organize, and control the world. Yet this is also a broken circle, suggesting that these cycles no longer function in harmony.

Composed of discarded technological components, plastic fragments, everyday objects, and natural debris, the installation transforms waste into a fragmented mandala—an unintended archive of human activity. These materials reveal distorted cycles of production and accumulation, where what is produced is no longer renewed but endlessly discarded and layered.

Installed within a museum devoted to preservation and knowledge, the work examines the rupture between systems of knowledge, embodied perception, and planetary fragility. Rather than measuring duration or progress, it confronts algorithmic acceleration with geological time, bodily perception, and cultural memory, exposing how contemporary temporal systems have become increasingly abstract and detached from lived experience.

Suspended between order and disintegration, Fractured Orbit creates a space where spiritual, technological, and ecological dimensions intersect. What once served as a tool for balance is transformed into a vortex of residues, inviting viewers to inhabit a fractured present in which time, knowledge, and our relationship to nature must be reconsidered.