2026
Remnants in Retrospect
HARSHIT BONDRE | KISALAY VORA | SIDDARTH KERKAR | SMITA MANDLIK
An exhibition that brings together a cluster of artists working with the multi-material, taking from memory the intangible thought processes and creative interactions they have experienced and bringing them alive again through their very tangible art. The abstract installations with their varying mediums, textures and colors are uniquely open to all kinds of audience interpretation but carry subtle hints of the lives lived and stories narrated forward. Each artist brings his individual exploration to the forefront: Bondre’s philosophical preoccupation with the interdimensional nature of time and space, Kisalay and his capturing of the Indian cultural landscape through personal festive memories, Kerkar’s constant experimentation with hybrid media that represents his attempt to unlearn and rediscover the contemporary, and Mandlik’s use of the material to forge a visual landscape of her inner emotional world.They are remnants of the creative endeavor coming together to become works of art in retrospect: multi-faceted yet holistic.
Curated by Sanjana Shah
(Monday, June 15 to Sunday, July 12)
He Who Permeates
Jayesh Sachdev & NFN Kalyan
Not everything that is present makes itself known. Some things must be looked at long enough, and hard enough, before they begin to look back.
NFN Kalyan and Jayesh Sachdev do not make work for the passive eye. They construct visual worlds which are dense, demanding, mythologically saturated. They pull viewers into an arena where image is never innocent and meaning is never settled. He Who Permeates is not an exhibition that offers resolution. It offers, instead, the more difficult gift of sustained unease.
The title is drawn from one of the popular monikers of Vishnu, the pervader, the one who does not dwell within the temple walls but is present in everything that the temple holds. It is a fitting frame for two practices that refuse containment, that seep through the boundaries of form, medium and iconography.
Kalyan works in accumulation. His large-scale oil canvases are built slowly, in layers. Each one a negotiation between Indian mythology and pop-cultural iconography, between devotional tradition and contemporary life. The result is an image that does not conform to the hierarchy of the sacred and the commercial. This is not pastiche, nor is it provocation for its own sake. Kalyan is interested in what the image sees, in the way meaning shifts and multiplies the longer you stay with it. He pushes each gesture, each mark, until it carries more meaning than an image alone can hold. Identity, in his canvases, is never a fixed condition, it is something perpetually in the act of becoming, perpetually coming undone. The divine, here, does not descend from above; it permeates from within.
Sachdev works in eruption. Colour in his practice is not decorative, it is structural, pulsing with the energy of the figures it inhabits. His forms spill from canvas into sculpture, refusing the frame, insisting on presence. Yet beneath this exuberance lies a practice of rigorous inquiry. Sachdev circles his subjects with the patience of someone who both reveres and doubts, who celebrates and interrogates in the same breath. The visual excess is not a distraction from meaning; it is the meaning, a mirror held up to a world that worships image and rarely pauses to ask why. In his hands, the icon does not stand apart from life it permeates, it bleeds into and becomes indistinguishable from the culture that continues to invoke it.
Placed in conversation, these two bodies of work do something that neither could accomplish alone. They create a space where the spectacle of iconography, which is most recognisable, becomes suddenly strange. Where the familiar image begins to feel like a question rather than an answer. Where the viewer, caught between Kalyan's layered mythologies and Sachdev's chromatic intensity, is drawn inward as much as outward.
He Who Permeates does not simply ask you to look, it asks you to enquire within. Not the self you imagine yourself to be, nor the self you are busy constructing, but something prior to both.
Curated by Mihir Thakkar
(Friday, April 17 - Thursday, May 28)
The Collective Memory of Contemporary Change
A Solo show by Chippa Sudhakar
Chippa Sudhakar highlights the co-existence of the rural and urban, the natural and the built, the past and the future, through his malleable terracotta medium. The idea of development is explored through a sensitive lens that takes into consideration the obstacles, motivations and balances that come into play. The medium is treated to create a combination of forms, merging abstract with figurative and allowing for the juxtaposition of organic and artificial. He highlights the impact that land has on our collective experience and memory and how the evolving landscapes evoke different emotions.
Having grown up in a rural environment amidst nature, he has witnessed the transformation of that land into a bustling urban area firsthand. Through his art he brings to the forefront the kind of changes that are occurring and urges the viewer to introspect on the cost of this rapid progression. The economic and ecological factors at play are emphasised upon and the resulting dramatic transformation is mirrored in his work. Using materials like soil, wood, terracotta and metal, each piece of art engages you with its various elements, being both rooted in tradition and contemporary in finish. This delicate balance emulates the balance that the ever-evolving urban landscape is attempting to strive with its natural surroundings. The classic human versus nature debate is artistically rendered and Sudhakar considers his surroundings to be a constant influence upon him. This influence is what led him to explore the idea of how we are moulded on a fundamental level by what we witness. Communities who are displaced with such urbanisation and migration, continue to remember the experience and the memories of displacement become DNA-coded within them. All of these themes are explored in great depth through his art, allowing each medium and technique to focus on different factors, and ultimately hoping to achieve a balance between them all, just as he wishes to see between human progress and the natural world.
Sanjana Shah
(Thursday, January 9 to Thursday, February 12)