Sohrab Hura’s (b.1981; lives and works in New Delhi, India) presents  oil paintings from his new body of work The Forest. The title encompasses the act of waiting within itself, evoking the forest as a space of myriad possibilities—it can harbour secrets, offer refuge, or provide a sense of solace and comfort. For Hura, the forest becomes both a physical and psychological manifestation. These works emerge from a place of remembrance, anticipation, and imagination. In the recent months, Hura has been accompanying his father to medical appointments that made him acutely aware of how time can feel interminable in the hospital waiting rooms. When he began working with oil paint, he felt a similar sense of waiting—the slow process of allowing one layer to dry before applying the next. His exploration of this new medium also stems from a desire to take a break from the heaviness of photography and his quest for tactility, softness, and meandering. While attuning himself to the physical act of making these paintings, Hura also experienced assuring affirmation of his presence in the real world.

For much of the past decade, Christopher Kulendran Thomas has been using advanced technologies across multiple disciplines to question the myths of Western individualism. His paintings metabolize the colonial art history that came to dominate in Sri Lanka after his family, who are Tamil, left escalating ethnic violence there. Kulendran Thomas often exhibits these paintings with video installations that fuse propaganda and counterpropaganda into a speculative vortex of alternate histories.

T. Vinoja’s (b. 1991; Kilinochchi, Sri Lanka) practice is influenced by contemporary art and Tamil literature, particularly the lived experiences of the Sri Lankan War (1983- 2009). Her work explores the war-torn landscapes, social conflict, and collective memory. Rooted in textile-based practices, her weaving embodies the concept of skin—both as a physical boundary and a metaphor for land, identity, and loss. The act of weaving itself is a process of connecting lines, much like the threads of history and personal experience. These lines symbolise both the fragility and resilience of human existence. Fabric, like skin, accompanies us through life and death, serving as a second layer that records our presence and absence. Through her practice, Vinoja seeks to evoke this enduring relationship between body, land, and memory, reflecting on the marks left by war and the stories woven into our collective past.

Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah (b. 1989, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka) is a multimedia artist whose practice ranges from installations to performance-based soundscapes, videos, and drawings. His work focuses on the destructive impact of Sri Lanka’s prolonged civil war, its effects on the ecological world and the lives of people existing amidst the ceaseless violence and trauma. Using motifs such as mycelium, reminiscent of the damaging wounds inflicted on nature, while reflecting on how land becomes the bearer of the vestiges of war, Pakkiyarajah’s work explores how nature is rendered vulnerable due to human actions and offers a lens into how they are inextricably linked to each other.

Prabhakar Pachpute (b. 1986; Sasti, Chandrapur, Maharashtra, India) works in an array of mediums and materials including drawing, light, stop- motion animations, sound, and sculptural forms. His use of charcoal has a direct connection to his subject matter and familial roots, coal mines and coal miners. Pachpute often creates immersive and dramatic environments in his site-specific works, using portraiture and landscape with surrealist tropes to critically tackle issues of mining labour and the effects of mining on the natural and human landscape. Using Maharashtra as a starting point, the artist combines research from around the world and personal experiences, moving from the personal to the global investigating a complexity of historical transformations on an economic, societal and environmental level.

Kallol Datta is a maker and researcher. Their practice reflects upon reconstructing, repurposing, and restructuring donated items of clothing and reclaimed textiles that hold memory, episodic events, and history, to negotiate larger questions about work and production, of labour and use, cultural sustainability, and of ideas revolving around research as production. The Dispatches series resides within the fifth chapter in Volume 4 - Misleading Truths Our Clothes Told Us. These dispatches are witnesses to episodic events in the Korean Peninsula during the early and mid-1900s and draw parallels to the social and bio-political ongoings in global societies today.

Soumya Sankar Bose (b. 1990) reconstructs archival materials and oral history into photography, films, alternative archives, and artist books. His hybrid mode of practice interweaving long-term research and engagement with local communities including his own family history accentuates certain subaltern experiences of the marginalised yet resilient in post-Partition Bengal.We Need to Talk in Whispers fits within the broader themes and concerns that permeate his other works. With the support of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Nantes, France, he has tried to build a narrative world that bridges the physical incidents and subjective emotions that accompany such experiences using references found in newspaper archives or court verdicts such as suicide notes, death announcements, social media posts, or the memories of those affected by the death of a loved one. 

Julien Segard (b. 1980; Marseille, France) 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.

Rathin Barman’s (b. 1981, Tripura, India) examines the nuances of the modern built environment as a tool for understanding socio-political history. Barman often breaks down the thoroughly engineered and fixed construct of a ‘home’ into a graphical outline of formal abstraction. In the Spatial Distortion series, Barman explores the notion of a ‘home’ as a living organism, as the configuration of spaces and other architectural features morph over time to mirror the mutability wrought in the time and lives of people. Concurrently, Barman also explores the various nuances of fragility and materiality with regard to architecture. In common parlance one does not associate the notion of fragility with a material such as concrete, but Barman through his experiences of working with materials of construction emphasises how this material also demands delicate handling and would often require multiple interventions of repair, much like the structure of a house which also needs renovation and maintenance for it to endure the ravages of time. One often notices how Barman plays around with the assumed infallibility of permanence by choosing concrete as his medium, which is both porous and rigid at the same time. The Spatial Distortion  series seem to highlight the certain shifting facets, maybe an addition of rooms, walls or extension of a balcony through the use of lines, colours and charcoal planes in multiple tonalities on pigmented concrete panels. The sculptures also evoke the past grandeur of these edifices, once based in the imposing colonial architecture, but have now succumbed to decay and ruin.

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