This untitled sculpture by Manish Nai is a column made from stacked secondhand books from the artist’s personal collection. Nai has collected more than 5000 second hand books, which he mobilizes towards different ends within his practice. The series of book columns to which this work belongs involves Nai’s aesthetic inquiry into what a book is that cannot be read, or a sculpture that can’t fully be seen. Nai is interested in the notion of how everyday objects possess minimal aesthetic qualities totally unrelated to their intended functionality. The books he collects are notable because of the ways the paper brown with age. Different factors determine the rate of aging, and different materials interact with air, light, and moisture in different ways.

His book sculptures expand upon Nai’s ongoing meditation on time itself, as compressed layers of paper settle into distinct strata like sedimentary rock. The sequencing of the innumerable pages and subtle tonal shifts as distinct layers brings a new kind of clarity to the substance. In the case of the stacked book towers, while the forms are cleaner and more minimal than ever before, the contents remain elusive, refusing access to their text. Their history as books is immediately accessible, but their content as text is arrested in time, frozen inside the sculpture.

Nai’s pieces are studies in tedious complexities, and elegant simplicities. The media that he uses are usually cheap and ubiquitous, alluding to both hierarchies of artistic media and Indian social structures. His vision for socially-conscious minimalism has earned Nai global attention as a crucial voice for Indian contemporary art. Paying mind towards the complex intersections of material culture, art history, class relations, and autobiography, his geometrically simple forms distill the essence of contemporary Mumbai.