Ascent Amidst Absence: Yash Vyas' Sculptural Art Ponders The Cost Of Urban Progress

In Mumbai, over the last few years, it has become increasingly difficult to find small, affordable apartments especially in central areas like Sion, Matunga, and Dadar. The number of 1BHK and studio units is shrinking as developers focus on building larger, more expensive homes. This shift reflects a broader pattern of exclusion. As the city prioritizes high-end housing and redevelopment projects, a whole demographic of young professionals, small families, single occupants is being pushed out. The people who need compact homes are often left with no choice but to move to the outskirts or share spaces they wouldn’t have chosen otherwise. In the name of progress, access to housing is becoming more unequal.

In his sculptural work 'Ascent Amidst Absence', sculptor and visual artist Yash Vyas explores the same exclusion; looking closely at who gets to belong in the cities we build, and who doesn’t. A cityscape carved entirely out of Tetris blocks, the sculpture depicts skyscrapers climbing over one another in a race towards the sky, displacing low-income and minority communities in the process. The work becomes a metaphor for the erasure of human stories beneath the gloss of development, where some degree of marginalization is built into the very architecture of modern cities.

In the following conversation, we speak with Yash about the cost of progress, and how contemporary urban landscapes often exclude many of its residents.

Can you tell us about your personal relationship with spaces? How have the places you’ve lived in, moved through, or been excluded from shaped the way you think about architecture and urban environments? How did you come to work with this particular sculptural language, and what drew you to using it to talk about cities and displacement?

My relationship with spaces has always been emotional and visceral. Growing up, I inhabited environments that constantly shifted, sometimes by choice, other times by force. I have lived in homes that felt expansive and others that felt temporary or precarious. These experiences taught me how space holds memory, how it can embrace or reject, nurture or alienate. The places I have been excluded from often stayed with me longer than the ones I was welcomed into. That absence becomes a presence in itself. Architecture, to me, is not just physical structure but a psychological landscape. It tells you who belongs, who is visible, who must adapt or disappear. This tension has profoundly shaped my understanding of urban environments, not just as a sculptor but as someone navigating a world where power is embedded in walls, corridors, and access points.

My sculptural language emerged from a desire to compress these complexities into form. I was drawn to modularity, repetition, and miniature scale because they allow me to both echo and distort the logic of city making. The act of sculpting becomes a negotiation with control, pattern, and the idea of scale as power. Through this language, I found a way to talk about displacement without reducing it to statistics. I wanted to make visible what often slips through the cracks, the people, textures, and silences lost in the name of progress.

Your sculpture uses Tetris blocks to build a cityscape, especially in Ascent amidst Absence. Can you walk us through your process — why did you choose this form, and how does it connect to your larger artistic practice? We’d love to understand the technical choices, the ideas behind the materials, and how this piece fits into your way of working as an artist.

The choice of Tetris blocks was intentional. They represent a visual language of order and fitting in, yet when placed in excess or imbalance, they become chaotic and oppressive. In Ascent Amidst Absence, I use these blocks to construct a city that is both familiar and estranged. It looks like it could exist, yet it reveals the absurdity of endless vertical ambition. Technically, I gravitate toward materials that carry contradiction. The blocks are rigid yet stackable, playful yet cold. I often work with industrial mediums, resins, concrete, polymers, because they mirror the artificiality of mass development. But I also introduce handcrafted elements to disrupt the sense of mechanical uniformity. This tension between the factory made and the handmade echoes the conflict between systemic urban planning and lived human experience.

This sculpture is part of a larger inquiry in my practice where I explore the human cost of urban evolution. I use form as a critique, scale as a storyteller, and absence as a material in itself. Every block in the sculpture is a deliberate decision, what is raised, what is buried, and what is left out altogether.

Like you mentioned, in many cities, new buildings and development often push out the people who were already living there, especially low-income and minority communities. What were your thoughts while making this project about cities that are being built today and who gets to belong in them?

While making this work, I kept thinking about who gets written into the blueprint and who remains in the margins. The cities we are building today often feel like monuments to a singular imagination, one that privileges capital, uniformity, and visibility from afar, while ignoring the lives that exist on the ground.

I was thinking about erasure, but also about resilience. About how certain communities are repeatedly displaced, yet continue to find ways to re root themselves. There is a quiet violence in the way development is marketed as progress. But there is also poetry in resistance, in the way stories, habits, and rituals survive despite being pushed to the edges.

This sculpture became my way of processing grief for the disappearing textures of the city, the informal settlements, the layered histories, the languages spoken in back alleys. It is also a critique of how policy and design are used to engineer exclusion. Who gets to belong in a city is no longer just a social question but a spatial one. And art, in its stillness, can make that visible.

Your sculpture shows buildings stacked higher and higher, but it also feels like something is being lost beneath that growth. What kind of future do you think we’re creating through this kind of urbanization? And how do you think art can help us imagine better, more inclusive cities?

The future we are building through this kind of urbanization feels increasingly disembodied. It is a vertical future that looks impressive from a distance but often forgets the ground it has uprooted. In our pursuit of growth, we are losing touch with slowness, with horizontal belonging, with the warmth of proximity. What is lost is not only physical space but also the intimacy of neighbourhood, the rhythm of shared life, and the permission to be different.

I believe art holds the potential to reimagine cities as spaces of care rather than control. It can intervene where architecture ends and where policy fails. It can remind us that a city is not just made of steel and concrete but of gestures, relationships, and memory.

By making visible the absences, by casting light on what lies beneath the gleaming façades, art can ask better questions. It can suggest possibilities beyond the blueprint. I am interested in that speculative space, not utopian, but honest. A space where we remember that inclusion is not ornamental but foundational. Through art, we can begin to imagine cities where ascent does not demand absence.

Follow Yash here.

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