Artist and musician Paul Purgas presents a new commission for Dilston Gallery, incorporating sound and materials gathered from the local park land to create an immersive installation, which builds on his ongoing research into the histories of design, music and spiritual philosophy within South Asia.

Through a multi-sensory composition of spatial and sonic elements, the project evokes the holistic, meditative and eco-conscious principles that manifested through South Asia’s prescient interpretation of Modernism, considering the movement’s awareness of environmental dialogues between architecture and design and its deep-rooted commitment to a harmonic relationship between humanity and nature. The work considers these lost threads of futurism as echoes which continue to speak into the present.

In the Temple of the Earth builds on the artist’s recent touring exhibition We Found Our Own Reality, which uncovered the utopian design and music that emerged in India post-Independence and focussed on a tape archive discovered by Purgas documenting the history of the nation’s first electronic music studio.