Soul Complex takes as its starting point a question posed by Indian architect Aditya Prakash in the poem Chandigarh – a presentation in free verse: does Chandigarh have a soul? The answer emerges within the poem itself: “this is a city with a soul, with a throbbing heart, and with a thinking sensitive brain.” It is from this idea — the possibility that a city might possess an inner life — that the title of the exhibition arises.
Built from the ground up in the 1950s, Chandigarh became one of the most ambitious urban projects of the 20th century. Conceived after Indian independence, the city was envisioned as a symbol of modernity and the future. The master plan and its most emblematic institutional buildings were developed by Le Corbusier, in collaboration with Pierre Jeanneret, Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry and numerous Indian architects and urban planners. At the centre of this vision stands the Capitol Complex, a monumental ensemble comprising the Palace of Assembly, the Secretariat and the High Court — large-scale structures in which architecture asserts itself as both sculptural and political gesture.
Throughout her work in Chandigarh, Inês d’Orey has photographed the city’s interiors and institutional spaces, exploring the ways in which architecture constructs atmospheres and sensory experiences. In the large-format photographs presented, many of them devoted to the Capitol Complex, architecture emerges as a living body, charged with memory and intention.
The exhibition in Galeria Presença brings together large-format photographs, lightboxes, and an installation dedicated to two important women architects involved in the construction of Chandigarh: Jane Drew and U. Eulie Chowdhury. Although they contributed to numerous buildings and to the definition of the city’s urban fabric, their names remained for decades less visible within the dominant narrative of modern architecture.
By bringing these two architects to the centre of the exhibition, Inês d’Orey extends a line of research that has marked her recent work: the investigation, identification and photography of buildings designed by pioneering women architects in the first half of the 20th century. This gesture seeks not only to revisit the history of architecture, but also to rebalance the way in which that history is told.
Soul Complex thus proposes an encounter between architecture, image and memory. Between the monumentality of modernist structures and the human stories that run through them, the exhibition returns to Aditya Prakash’s initial question: can a city have a soul? In Inês d’Orey’s images, Chandigarh emerges as a complex organism, simultaneously rational and sensitive, where the built environment seems to retain the energy of those who imagined it.
Inês d’Orey in Chandigarh
if observable in its broad entirety, as one hopes will happen one day, this transnational inventory by Inês d’Orey will have no rival or equivalent in contemporary Portuguese art.
Written by Vasco Rosa in Observador 07.05.2026
At Galeria Presença, in Porto (Rua Miguel Bombarda, 570), the architecture photographer Inês d’Orey presents the exhibition Soul Complex, on view until 9 May.
Anyone familiar with her books Porto Interior, 2006-2011 and Beograd Concrete, or aware of the work she has carried out through artistic residencies in different European cities, such as Copenhagen, Bucharest and Aahrus, or even on trips to Buenos Aires and Tokyo, cannot fail to be interested in what the photographer brought back from her visit to the Indian city of Chandigarh, at the foothills of the Himalayas, in June 2025. Neither the English designation Soul Complex helps to situate this new campaign, nor was this the first time that Portuguese people have taken an interest in the Indian city conceived from scratch by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret with the collaboration of British and local architects (see Paula Santos, 1991 Chandigarh, Porto: Circo de Ideias, 2011, 52 pp.), yet Inês d’Orey’s surprising work demands our attention or curiosity, because of what it conveys through its fresh and questioning gaze upon environments that, at different latitudes, periods and styles, the architects’ designs brought to multiple spaces of habitation and leisure.
The absence of human figures paradoxically, exponentially, amplifies the temporality of the photographed spaces, allowing us to fantasise about the memory of what was lived in public spaces as well as in private spaces.
In this exhibition we encounter again the use of backlit mechanisms that the artist discovered in vintage shops, as had happened in other exhibitions and in an initiative in the shop windows of a commercial street in the centre of Porto, but also the artist’s habitual parsimony of information about the records selected. A gallery handout gives us a modest minimum of information about the photographic subject, perhaps intending that we should all know what we are looking at, but this singular way of exhibiting and presenting, in a country with very little interest in other latitudes (has anyone monitored the quantity, quality and geography of the foreign press read in Portugal across different media and devices?), seems somewhat imprudent. Outside the — now they say “bubble” — of architecture and design, few will immediately recognise Chandigarh as one of the greatest experiments in the integrated creation of public and residential facilities on a large scale, from urban planning to domestic furniture and lighting, led in the 1950s by Le Corbusier-Jeanneret and local associates, and which was, one might say, a direct inspiration for the creation of Brasília.
At the end of the century, relevant literature on the new city emerged, from Kiran Joshi, Documenting Chandigarh (1999, 286 pp.), in the same year that two French antique dealers, Éric Touchaleaume and Gérald Moreau, made their first of many trips to the Indian city in search of chairs and other furniture, at the time rejected or abandoned by the population and the administration (they made a 640-page book about this in 2010, L’aventure indienne), but subsequently readmitted and legally protected by the authorities of India, as well as sold at auctions or reproduced in Western replicas (including, a few years ago, by the Portuguese Kinda). In 2014, the Parisian Galerie Patrick Seguin published Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret: Chandigarh, India, 1951-66, however the bibliography is extensive, with articles in magazines and several exhibition catalogues, such as the one organised in Milan by Piergiorgio Sclarandis in 1993. To give an idea, a small side table for students designed in teak by Jeanneret, and in excellent state of conservation, was sold by Sotheby’s for 7,000 dollars.
In her very beautiful photographs, Inês d’Orey is interested in nothing but the geometries of colour, light and shadow that the monumental constructions in Chandigarh placed before her eyes, in the Nirman theatre, the High Court, the Parliament, the hospital complex or the indisputable Tower of Shadows, or even in a sports stadium, and which are now presented to us in large formats or in small lightboxes in beautiful wood. The artist’s habitual parsimony, also evident in the reduced number of images in Beograd Concrete, the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name at Galeria das Salgadeiras in Lisbon, did not wish to make greater use of the ample space of Galeria Presença, leaving us with the bittersweet feeling of someone who would have liked to have seen more. For one thing seems certain: if observable in its broad entirety, as one hopes will happen one day, this transnational inventory by Inês d’Orey will have no rival or equivalent in contemporary Portuguese art.