Art Basel 2025

Experimenter presents a group exhibition with works by Adip Dutta, Ayesha Sultana, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Biraaj Dodiya, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Julien Segard, Krishna Reddy, Praneet Soi, Rathin Barman, T. Vinoja, and Vikrant Bhise.
- Christopher Kulendran Thomas, ft-ckt-131f03dc-0014-st-20-cfg-6.9-seed-0171941323.png, 2025
- Christopher Kulendran Thomas, ft-ckt-243a04fd-0022-st-20-cfg-6.3-seed-7420018653.png, 2024
Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ (b. 1979; lives and works in Berlin, Germany) 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.
- Krishna Reddy, Reclining Figure, 1950
- Krishna Reddy, Discerning, 1953, 1954
Krishna Reddy (1925 – 2018) consistently experimented with form, technique and application. At Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, he developed and invented the process that he is most well-known for – simultaneous multicolour viscosity printing – and broke new ground in intaglio printmaking. In collaboration with Hayter, Reddy developed a new technique in multi-colour printing by utilising variable viscosities of the printing inks. He was able to control the viscosity of the inks by altering the oil consistency in each impression, thereby allowing the inks to occupy different depths without mixing with each other, a process never done before. Using a range of rollers, he pushed the inks to desired parts of the plate, making spectacular unique mono-prints, rich in their textural quality and dimensionality. Reddy constantly pushed the boundaries that were not only confined to the formal process of printmaking but a revolutionary way of thinking on how to develop a new form.
Ayesha Sultana’s graphite drawings signify a delicate yet intriguing dissonance between appearance and reality, revelation and ambiguity—through configurations and arrangements of geometric shapes and spatial structures, in a frame-by-frame progression of image and time. On closer viewing, the smooth surface of the paper is dark but reflective, nestled within it lies an intricate mesh of frictions and ruptures which animate the tactile surface resembling the texture of metal; thus underscoring the mineral attributes of graphite. This also refers to an element of three-dimensionality produced by the dialogue between the versatile malleability of paper and the austere physicality of graphite.
Praneet Soi’s presents work created from his ongoing immersion with craftsmen in Kashmir. The craft of painting on wood cuts and papier-mache, introduced to Srinagar by Sufi preachers traveling to Kashmir from Central Asia in medieval times, captivated Soi to work with the master craftsman Fayaz Jan in the traditional Karkhana, or studio to produce wood cuts or hand-made papier-mache tiles and painting upon them traditional Kashmiri motifs. Ever since his first immersion with the craftsmen in 2014, Soi has been returning to Srinagar to intertwine himself within the Karkhana’s working rhythm, making decisions with the craftsmen pertaining to the motifs, such as their color and composition, that are historically recognizable within the region’s craft industry, but which push away from their original decorative trajectory into what might be described as experimental compositions. Soi often-times introduces his own imagery into the conversation, opening up interesting possibilities to explore with craftsmen. These are hybrid constructions, containing within them not only conversations between Soi and the craftsmen but also the histories of patterns as they migrated across geography and culture in times gone by.
Artworks
T. Vinoja
Endless edges, 2025
T. Vinoja’s (b. 1991) practice is based in the landscape—both its physical presence and its emotional weight. Since the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009), which lasted for over three decades, she has carried questions about the land and its people. The war may have ended, but its traces remain embedded in the soil, in memory, and in everyday life. This particular work is inspired by those wounded landscapes. To her, the land is not just a backdrop—it is a witness, a victim, and a silent bearer of trauma.
Vinoja approaches the landscape as something that holds memory, loss, and grief, much like the human body. In this work, the land and the body are metaphorically intertwined. Through this connection, she explores the ongoing relationship between trauma, memory, and place—how landscapes can hold wounds, just as people do.
Biraaj Dodiya’s (b. 1993; lives and works in Mumbai, India) new work Atlas of Holding Together is a series of collaged drawings on paper. Combining images from Dodiya’s point-and-shoot camera with watercolour, ink, and acrylic drawings, these works trace back into the beginnings of her interest in abstraction and in constructing a cryptic geography, connecting body and landscape, imagined and urban. The photographs in this particular body of work—from the street or from the studio—are of things being held together or falling apart. This sense of collapse and a resistance to collapse has become a significant point of interest in Dodiya’s practice. Here, the black and white images combined with the immediacy and physical lucidity of water-based materials, the transparencies and overlaps it allows, give the final image a scan- or x-ray-like quality, almost as if it were exposing the organs and bones of her larger practice. 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.
In his new series of works, Vikrant Bhise (lives and works in Mumbai, India) has portrayed Chembur’s Siddharth Colony, an important and active Dalit neighbourhood in the city. Rendered entirely in shades of blue—a symbol of resistance, dignity, and the collective strength of the Dalit community—the works evoke a history of struggle and a vision for justice. Places like Worli BDD Chawl, Matunga Labour Camp, Ramabai Nagar Ghatkopar, Kannamwar Nagar Vikhroli, and Siddharth Colony are more than just residential spaces in Mumbai—they are places where Ambedkarite philosophy has lived, been practiced, and celebrated through public readings, street plays, musical performances, study circles, and political organising. Each colony holds a distinct legacy. Now that many of these colonies are redeveloped, Bhise questions where future generations will gather to organise, perform, or express their activism, but emphasises that the spirit of the Dalit Movement will endure through memory, voice, and resistance.
Vikrant Bhise’s 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. 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.
Bhasha Chakrabarti (b. 1991, Honolulu, HI; lives and works in New Haven, CT) presents Oceanic Feelings, part of a new and ongoing series The Ship as Co-Conspirator (to capitalism and to its undoing), which is based on a series of visits that Chakrabarti has done to the shipbreaking yards across South Asia, where over 85% of the world’s ships are broken down and recycled. While there are ships of all kinds dealt with here, a large number of them are immense container ships which ferry the world’s commodities across the seas. Oceanic Feelings is a triptych of embroidered and needle-felted works, done on used and discarded clothing based on the eroded and barnacled surfaces of these mammoth vessels, which have reached the end of their lives. The embroidered pieces are set within brass portholes which she has collected from the shipyards themselves, and they were, of course, taken from the bodies of these same vessels. Rather than looking out into a distance, when one looks into these windows, one is faced with a tactile surface and immediate reality. It’s a reality that forces us to reckon with the violence of mass consumption and the inherent impossibility as well as unsustainability of the systems that are there to support globalised capitalism, even under promises of recycling.
Rathin Barman’s, Arbitrary Spaces, are a new body of cast concrete relief sculptures with brass projections highlight altered, contemporary arches and pillars. These forms are drawn from the architectural elements and renderings of grand colonial homes in North Kolkata, which Barman has engaged with for many years. This body of work also stands as a metaphor for the makeshift tenements and adaptive architectural interventions introduced to accommodate expanding families or migrant tenants—individuals who have, over generations, made these homes their own. Barman explores the notion of ‘home’ as a living organism, using a precise conjunction of disembodied built forms and the simultaneous renewal of future possibilities. In contrast to the perceived permanence of architectural structures, his work underscores how the configuration of spaces and architectural features morph over time, reflecting the shifting contexts and lives of their inhabitants. In Barman’s practice, architecture becomes an anthropological tool—the representation of space emerges not only from spontaneous, sensorial responses but also from deeply personal connections forged with the residents of these evolving homes
Artworks
Julien Segard
The edge of memory V, 2025
Julien Segard‘s (b. 1980 in Marseille, France; lives and works in Goa, India) body of work The Edge of Memory explores forgotten zones, spaces of contradiction where industry meets nature, and where marginal activities and hidden freedoms exist. The project began over 20 years ago in the industrial landscapes of the south of France around the Étand-de-Berre lagoon.
The intimate, symbiotic, and oftentimes destructive relationship between man, nature, and architecture transforms into points of introspection for Julien Segard, who is fascinated by these blind spots and places that escape control, where something unexpected can emerge. His work is a journey through fragmented geographies and inner worlds, reflecting on resilience, decay, and the stories one might find in these margins.
Over several years Adip Dutta (b. 1970, Kolkata) has immersed himself 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. Often, he sculpts trees and fallen branches in bronze in an extension of his exploration of form, but also as witnesses to his ethereal vision of the nightscape. Evident in the bronze sculptures is Dutta’s gaze that invites the viewer to renew value, we assign as a society, to objects that are everyday and occupy our field of vision.
For any further information or inquiries email admin@experimenter.in

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Art Basel 2025

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