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. Sultana’s paintings depict an infinite landscape of space between empty sky and sea where vistas in the foregrounded paintings meet colour-fields, and light gives way to vacuity. In the Miasms series, the artist explores ephemerality and fluidity. Tissue paper with its delicate and translucent nature is easily torn, damaged, dissolved, and dispersed. However, it transforms from a tenuous medium into a vehicle for artistic expression evoking both skin and the turbulence of the sea.

Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ paintings metabolise Sri Lanka’s colonial history, compressing mutliple art historical timelines onto a single canvas. He is an artist of Tamil descent, who spent his formative years in London, after his family left Sri Lanka during  the escalating ethnic oppression there. Through immersive film installation, painting and sculpture, Kulendran Thomas’ practice explores lost histories, alternative possibilities and Sri Lanka’s colonial art history. He uses advanced technologies across multiple disciplines and often through fluid collaborations with architects, writers, technologists, designers, musicians and activists from around the world.

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 or pigment 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 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.

Julien Segard carefully considers the urban environment, the crevices where the constructed meets the natural, and how the two become inseparable. His works feature an assemblage of found elements and architectural structures that exist because of humans, but are bereft of human presence. The intimate, symbiotic, and oftentimes destructive relationship between man, nature and architecture become points of introspection for Segard in his works. Rooted in experiences of solitude and silence, Segard’s practice immerses the viewer in the minuteness of their elements while simultaneously operating as the entry points into vast infinite spaces.

Vikrant Bhise’s artistic practice iterates his commitment to the revolutionary spirit inherent in the Ambedkar consciousness, and struggles against caste-based domination and its vertiginous implications on land, liberty, and labour. Bhise’s iconography is informed and deliberate in its radicality as evident in his series “Consciousness towards pillars of equality”, “Disruptions and destructions”, and “Web of displacement migration and subsistence”. The dynamic narratives demur to violation of social justice, hoping to inspire reform through activism while remembering episodes of fundamental struggles that include but are not limited to caste, class, and gender-based oppression.

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.