Sohrab Hura’s gouache paintings are testaments to his yearning for softness and the fluid malleability of the process and the medium owing to the numbness he felt towards the harsh permanence of photography during a time of personal loss and ailment. Hura’s exploration in image making through drawing is underscored by his tendency to reflect upon the social and the political through everyday ordinariness underscored by love, joy, relationships and the familial. His immediate space also includes animals while the significance of title texts, tempering the tone of the images, creates a parallel between this body of work with the format of a photobook.

Christopher Kulendran Thomas ((b. 1979; lives and works in Berlin, Germany) spent his formative years in London, after his family left Sri Lanka during the civil war. His knowledge of the civil war and its long-drawn aftermath, like many other diasporic Sri Lankan Tamils, resulted from the circulating images, news and stories about the region that were disseminated through manifold sources at the time. His interests lie in unpacking the multiplicity of historical narratives and the elusive nature of ‘true events’ as opposed to their claim of objectivity. The image and therefore what it represents, and the context in which it emerged, influences his works significantly. 

Through immersive film installation, painting and sculpture, Thomas’ practice is underscored by the representation of modern art and visual culture, specifically in the Sri Lankan context. In his paintings, the initial compositions are generated by a constantly evolving machine learning tool that sifts through thousands of art historical images using an algorithm he has built. Once this image is fixed, Thomas paints the digital image by hand on the canvas, a process that allows adaptations and improvisations through the human act of painting. Thomas’ works question the conventional ways in which paintings are seen, as his practice attempts to bring together simultaneous historical timelines onto a single canvas.

Prabhakar Pachpute’s (b. 1986; lives and works in Pune, India) works present views of a dystopic, post-industrial, barren landscape, cohabited by metamorphosed animals, dysfunctional machines and headless humans. Pachpute’s use of charcoal has a direct connection to his subject matter and familial roots: coal mines and coal miners. Using Maharashtra as a starting point, Pachpute’s work integrates wider research, fiction and personal experiences that trace the complex historical transformations caused by coal mining and mining labour on an economic, societal and environmental level.

Traversing the macrocosm through one’s body as a way of seeing and experiencing, Radhika Khimji draws on an array of mediums and a layered technique of mark- making to reimagine geographies and abstract aspects of the environment. Khimji’s visual language searches for a place between architecture and gesture through a collaged way of working. Informed by the physicality and materiality of the making process, Khimji’s work navigates the perpetual displacements of the transitory and fluid body moving across a space fragmented by many polarities.

Rooted in process and the act of making, Ayesha Sultana’s practice is an ongoing investigation of drawing, of seeing space in continuum, of exploring gaps in visual memory and of looking at the periphery and what is overlooked in plain sight.

The act of mark-making and repetition is at the crucible of Ayesha Sultana’s practice and these deliberations are revealed through the drawing series ‘Breath Count’. Emphasizing on awareness of her breath through scratching the surface of clay-coated paper are personal explorations of mark-making and corporeality for Sultana. They are a contemplation of the interconnectedness of her own body to larger systems. Cutting into the surface of the paper, Sultana reveals patterns that represent a delicate inward probe using time, rhythm and removal in breath.

Adip Dutta’s (b. 1970; lives and works in Kolkata, India) practice is immersed in the nightscape of the city, relooking at the sculpturality of form left behind in empty spaces of bustling footpaths, wares sold on streets tightly packed with tarpaulin and discarded items of daily use – in an extension of his exploration of form, objecthood, materiality, but also as witnesses to his ethereal vision of the nightscape where the objects lie as mortal remains as well as desires for the vital and the regenerative. Dutta’s gaze invites the viewer to renew the value we assign as a society to objects that are every day and occupy our field of vision, and in which the city remains intrinsic to their being.

‘Atlas of open blinds’ (2024) is a series of collaged drawings on paper. Combining images from the artist’s point and shoot camera, with watercolor and ink drawings - the works construct a cryptic geography, connecting body and landscape, imagined and urban. The immediacy and physical lucidity of water-based materials, combined with images of exterior worlds (mostly shot in close surroundings of current or past studio spaces) evoke a sense of transparency – of material and of making. These function as a prequel to larger paintings; they contain diagrams, suggestions, clues, questions, spontaneous conjurings and ways of looking. Construction, decay, formation and collapse become verbs of a poetic interchangeability; the image arrived at is a tentative map of the world charting a choreography for searching.

At the forefront of struggle against caste-based domination and its vertiginous implications on land, liberty and labour, Vikrant Bhise’s artistic practice iterates his commitment to the revolutionary spirit inherent in the Ambedkarite consciousness. Bhise is committed to the expression of social justice, realisation of enduring reform through activism, and remembrance of struggles against caste, class and gender-based oppression.

Bhise is presenting a monumental painting ‘Mahad 1927: The First Civil Rights Struggle of India’ at Art Mumbai 2024, which depicts two landmark events in Indian history— the Mahad Satyagraha on 20 March 1927, and the conference that followed on 25 December 1927. About 3000 Dalits led by Babasaheb Ambedkar drank water from the Chavdar Tank, asserting their right of equality and equal access to public resources. Animals were allowed to drink water from the tank but not Dalits. The year 2027 will mark the centenary of this event, where Babasaheb had said: “We are not going to the Chavdar Lake merely to drink its water. We are going to the Lake to assert that we too are human beings like others. It must be clear that this meeting has been called to set up the norm of equality.”

In Praneet Soi’s ‘Bird in Red’, ‘Bird in Green’ & ‘Bird in Blue’, the Bird is a metaphor for the transmission of culture. Like birds, patterns too migrate. Within Soi’s work, the shapes themselves were gleaned from architecture, from window grills or jaalis and geometrically patterned Khatambandhi ceilings Soi came across in Srinagar. As he began working with them, assembling them, bird motifs began to form. The works are painted in with the gold patterning that is ubiquitous amongst craftsmen in Kashmir. This delicate pattern work represents a material knowledge that is passed from master to pupil, from hand to hand. Different tropes of patterning known to the craftsmen form the changing intensity of gold within the works. The background is painted on in washes, to allow for translucence.

Reba Hore’s practice is rooted in the dailyness that occupied her field of vision. Frenetic and at times even dizzying, her work was furious yet a strong humanist quality is evident, whether in the painted shadows of the humans in her images or the fragile catharsis of her subjects. The fervent lines of colours in the paintings and works on paper make form, figure and landscape indiscernible, underscoring a form of erasure. Hore’s is an expressionistic, powerful practice alluding to a confident embodiment of motion that reveals a gaze from the interiority of an entangled knot of experiences. Reba Hore was educated at Calcutta University and Government College of Art & Craft in Kolkata. Hore completed her graduation in Economics and became an active member of the Communist Party in 1948. She lived and worked in Kolkata, New Delhi, and in Santiniketan. Actively involved in politics from a formative age, she took part in the tumultuous student movements in Kolkata in the 1950s and was deeply moved by the human misery she encountered during the Bengal Famine of 1943, an experience that continued to resonated in her practice. Her works reside in several private and public collections in India and abroad.

Rathin Barman (b. 1981; Lives and works in Kolkata, India) draws attention to how architecture adapts itself to a growing influx of people over extended periods of time through the Space Counts series. By providing an anthropological lens into the endless possibilities a space can entail, Barman redefines the idea of architecture as a fixed entity through multiple charcoal dissections and brass inlay on a concrete base, to reflect on human interventions upon built environments. Translating the aesthetic idea of a space or an illusion of a space with functional aspects, the Space Counts series highlights Barman’s gaze at details of buildings and the multiplicities of their architectural intricacies, such as windows, trellises and grilles. Like trees with shared roots, these homes are polycentric, since most of these structures are interlocked and inseparable and so are its people and their personal histories and relationships with each other.