Mumbai-based artists Doyel Joshi and Neil Ghose Balser bring ‘New Dawn’, an installation of 108 red monobloc chairs, to Amsterdam’s NDSM-werf, inviting visitors to pause, reflect and consider cycles of change and renewal.
At Amsterdam’s NDSM-werf this summer, 108 red monobloc chairs in a circle form an unexpected site of pause in one of Europe’s busiest cities. The installation by artists Doyel Joshi and Neil Ghose Balser of howareyoufeeling.studio, a multidisciplinary art and design practice based in Mumbai, India, transforms one of the world’s most ubiquitous pieces of furniture into a space for collective reflection.
On view from 10 July to 23 August 2026, the installation arranges the chairs in a circle, inviting visitors to sit and spend time together. Throughout the summer, this circle of chairs will move through different locations across the NDSM-werf — the former site of the Nederlandsche Dok en Scheepsbouw Maatschappij (NDSM) shipyard — creating what the artists describe as a dynamic spatial choreography. Its mobility reinforces the work’s central ideas that places, communities, and perspectives are continually shifting, and that moments of stillness can offer a way to navigate that uncertainty.
Found in public spaces across the world, and particularly recognisable in its red form in India, the inexpensive plastic monobloc chair carries little of the aesthetic beauty traditionally associated with art objects. Yet this familiarity and ubiquity — and ultimately, accessibility — are precisely why Joshi and Ghose Balser chose these chairs. They are utilitarian objects designed to be used, shared, and moved without worry; objects that belong as much to ordinary life as to the installation. By placing 108 of them together, a number with spiritual significance in South Asian mystic traditions across Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, the artists have turned them into an invitation to participate without the unease and anxiety of interacting with conventional "art" objects.
Originally commissioned by the Brighton Festival in 2025, where it was presented across multiple locations in Brighton, ‘New Dawn’ takes its name and concept from composer and musician Anoushka Shankar’s album and track of the same name. Drawing on natural and human cycles — the rising and setting of the sun, changing tides, waking and dreaming — Joshi and Ghose Balser question what it might mean to pause amid periods of change, and whether new ways of seeing can emerge from that pause.
To learn more, follow @howareyoufeeling.studio on Instagram.
Listen to a podcast about ‘New Dawn’ here.
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