Artists for Artists
Aishwarya Arumbakkam, Sathish Kumar, Rupali Patil, Rai
April 05 – June 14, 2025
Opening preview: Saturday, April 05, 2025 | 6 - 8 PM
Experimenter – Ballygunge Place & Hindustan Road, Kolkata
Experimenter presents Artists for Artists, four solo projects across both gallery spaces in Kolkata:
At Experimenter – Ballygunge Place:
Ten sounds I cannot hear by Aishwarya Arumbakkam selected by Sohrab Hura
Sunlight by Sathish Kumar selected by Sohrab Hura
If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes by Rupali Patil selected by Rathin Barman
At Experimenter – Hindustan Road:
Fever by Rai selected by Bhasha Chakrabarti
Each practitioner has been selected by an artist from the gallery’s program. The exhibition attempts to establish how artists, whether through long-form conversations in each other’s studios or outside of the confines of their workplaces, can yield generous and productive ground for experimentation and sustained dialogue. Artists for Artists marks Experimenter’s 16th anniversary and is rooted in the gallery’s commitment to amplifying diverse practices, values that have been pivotal to its programming over the years.
Aishwarya Arumbakkam
Ten sounds I cannot hear
Selected by Sohrab Hura
Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata
In Aishwarya Arumbakkam’s practice, photography shapes her connection to the physical world, tethering her to things that worry and excite her, that she longs for, and wants to hold on to. In Ten sounds I cannot hear, she uses photography, video, printmaking, and drawing to build and maintain a close connection with her parents across continents, in the United States and India. Using repeatedly mediated imagery, Arumbakkam shows a complex view of immigration where she and her loved ones are faced with the obstacle of separation while trying to preserve a sense of closeness. The title of the series is inspired by a folder in her archive of photographic and audio material, recorded with her parents over a screen, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the process of making digital time into physical objects, Arumbakkam attempts to shrink the distance that separates her from her ageing mother and father, and lengthen the time she has left with them.
Aishwarya Arumbakkam, b. 1988 lives and works in Chennai, India.
Sathish Kumar
Sunlight
Selected by Sohrab Hura
Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata
Sathish Kumar’s foray into photography began in his youth when he spent the better part of his school holidays in his uncle’s photography studio in Bengaluru. He photographed ordinary, everyday moments and scenes, like school picnics, cricket grounds, and his friends, with a point-and-shoot camera that was given to him. Kumar has carried this aspect of capturing seemingly ordinary things through the course of his practice, which is best summarized in his own words as “a record of his everyday existence, all encounters and journeys, and an expression of himself, his life, and the world around him.” Sunlight—his ongoing body of work that he began during the COVID-19 pandemic—started as a response to the unease and anxiety that he experienced in confinement. Hope took the form of sunlight, gently easing out the darkness from his mind. Kumar’s photographs from this period are symbolic of his gradual journey from the stillness of lockdown to the post-pandemic years. His subjects are varied: sites in Hampi, Kanchipuram, Chennai, light in its various forms, and loved ones. This work has helped Kumar find balance amidst his contrasting feelings of hope and anxiety, where each image is connected by a moment in time.
Sathish Kumar, b.1986; lives and works in Chennai, India.
Rupali Patil
If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes
Selected by Rathin Barman
Experimenter – Ballygunge Place, Kolkata
Trained as a printmaker, Rupali Patil is interested in exploring various mediums in her practice to delineate the boundaries between them and turn them into political and social statements. Her work focuses on how women’s bodies—their fluidity, symbiotic relationship, and interconnectedness—are impacted by environmental degradation and capitalist structures. Patil is currently exploring the issues faced by female sugarcane workers, specifically in the Beed district of Maharashtra, where their health is disproportionately affected. She uses ecofeminism as a framework for understanding the woman’s body as a tangible entity and how it responds to heavy industrialization. In If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes, Patil presents a new body of drawings that span various stages of her practice and a new sculptural installation. One series depicts shifting landscapes and the space held by architecture within, while another set from Patil’s solo exhibition in Berlin explores fluid corporeality in search of the force that is more potent and powerful as menstruation. Her sculptures show us another perspective of unacknowledged labour, both human and ecological, that hold systems together, drawing a parallel between mycelial networks and feminine contributions, which are often undervalued.
Rupali Patil, b.1984; lives and works in Pune, India.
Rai
Fever
Selected by Bhasha Chakrabarti
Experimenter – Hindustan Road, Kolkata
Rai works across various media such as images, text, and installations that explore states of inconsistency and suspension within themes of spatial negotiations, permeability, impression and erasure, recollection and amnesia. In Fever, she presents parts from three ongoing bodies of work—Fever, Search Party, and Ngan & Nilnil—which form a constellation of inquiries into movement, inheritance, belonging, and becoming. They explore ways of how we notice, absorb, and relate to the world around us and how its vastness influences the intimate. While the series Fever focuses on a state of transformation; a disruption of the body's rhythm - through familial threads, Search Party concocts an array of objects that are layered with traces—some visible, others concealed. In the Ngan and Nilnil series, Rai renders sites of simultaneous presence and absence, where memory becomes a connecting node.
Rai, b.1993; lives and works in Goa, India.
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