Dear Stuti, I can’t say exactly when it was that we became friends, but I think it has something to do with the months we lived in the same room, not speaking a word to each other, and then that one evening we decided to break the silence. It remains something of a...

Instructions to study a leaf Select healthy, mature leaves. Collect them in a dry, plastic bag.Look around from where your feettouch the ground. Do not move themfrom their chosen graves.  Observe the sample for its morphological features.Bend down and say hello. Be...

Origin Story And so, Brahma, the spider,   spins again a silver web. His body  is all night. Stars pin themselves   around his eight ankles across  all eight directions as we spill   from his spinneret like spiderlings  waking into life. And Mother to us all,   he...

ChatGPT has an Idea for a Poem   In conclusion, it was not want. I have a hundred and fifty two thousand approximations of want. This isn’t that. No zap of lightning over my proverbial head. No hunger in the cavity of my drives. No flush of feelings in my...

Untitled Between the scratching pencil and the interface,      a red palm bloomsinto a fist of petals     i bite its green stem         and the white sap turnspaisley with want    i hold it close          this fiery missive from the tombsthese fingers long as...

n art show can be many different things. The white cube offers a blank canvas for curatorial intervention, a hospitable surface for different discursive threads to coalesce into an intelligible pattern. It can reveal unseen connections, pose...

A story always starts before it can be told. ~ Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life   How else to arrive at the ecstasy of ourselves if we cannot see another’s body? ~ Tishani Doshi, Pilgrimage Beauty, as an eternal idea, is best embodied in art, Susan...

On a road trip to Ladakh last year, I learnt about “suture zones” during a conversation over dinner with a mutual friend, a research scholar studying geophysics. In geology, a “suture zone” is a place where two tectonic terrains meet, i.e. an area where chunks of...

In the histories of post-Independence Indian sculpture, the dominant narratives of modernism have often privileged monumentality, nationalism, and masculine sculptural authority. Yet such frameworks have left comparatively little room for practices that pursued...

When I came back from US I knew nobody in Sri Lanka. I first started painting seriously while we were there and I also had my first solo exhibition while Sasanka and I were in Santa Barbara.[^1] I started going to exhibitions at the newly opened Heritage Gallery in...

Last night, we slept in the forest. A light body landed on the roof and we dreamt it was a leopard. A collective dream built from fear and fascination that held us on a threshold. What is it that we expected in the forest? A being larger than our understanding? What...

The art practice of Nandini Bagla Chirimar in the series titled It’s the Little Things… and My Mother’s Closet, encompasses her engagement with everyday objects, domestic spaces and material processes. This essay is an attempt to explore how her artwork employs a...

Over the recent past, most contemporary dance work in India suffers from the affliction of politics always trumping physical language. Choreographers are entirely preoccupied with perfecting a standpoint rather than labouring at articulating a devised phrase of...

Layers of cement once obscured the 16th century painted ceiling of the Sabz Burj in Nizamuddin in Delhi. Restoration work done by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (in partnership with the Archaeological Survey of India and with the support of Havells India Limited)...

This personal essay takes a long view of the artwork of Sunil Gupta and Chitra Ganesh, two diaspora artists whose articulations of queer existence foreground a compelling range of aesthetic and socio-political concerns. I reflect on their practice, curating some of my...