For its second iteration, Multiplay presents “Soft Systems”, a platform where play becomes a tool to expand meaning, connect deeper, and learn together. Soft Systems are flexible, adaptive structures that hold space for shared agency, care, and responsiveness. Multiplay functions as a sandbox for collective experiences, where multiple minds converge, roles shift, and the boundaries between host, artist, and audience dissolve. For over two decades, we have explored how play can map the relationship between idea, space, and viewer, and how exhibitions can open up new ways of seeing and being. Multiplay brings these questions to life through palpable practices, gestures, interventions, and interactions that invite engagement, reflection, and collect responses. This year, artists from Zambia, Germany, and Australia, alongside practices based in India, contribute distinct sensibilities to this evolving dialogue. They invite us to heal anxieties by playing the doctor, enter a bubble of beauty, trace the light within a 500-year-old building, or reclaim the newsprint as artwork, rest as an act of resistance. Each practice is a soft, responsive system, unfolding through care, attention, and action. Together, these interventions show that the softness of artistic systems lies in their openness and adaptability. Multiplay becomes more than a framework; it is a living, breathing space where care flows, play extends, and knowledge spreads, tenderly, palpably, and endlessly.
Thukral & Tagra,
Gurgaon, December 2025
Multiplay02, Soft Systems is a tender constellation Each of these practices operates as a soft system: adaptive, human, and open-ended. They hold space rather than occupy it. They invite rather than instruct. They reveal that participation is not merely an activity; it is a relationship. Together, this group builds an exhibition that
As designers and artists, you have always responded strongly to architecture. The projects in the exhibition function as spatial structures that can break yet still hold. They are brittle, extendable and malleable, yet they endure. How do you frame soft systems with soft architecture, particularly because the word ‘systems’ is specific. Architecture speaks about space, but ‘systems’ implicates the bodies, human and non-human, contained within that space and the nuances of their interactions.
T&T: We often return to Céline Condorelli’s Support Structures, which frames scaffolding as more than reinforcement. For us, it becomes a soft system that contributes values rather than simply holding up monoliths. It allows buildings to learn and blossom. We are drawn to similar systems that act as connective tissue. Like cartilage between bones, they enable movement, making structures more malleable and open to new experiences. We imagine soft systems as invitations rather than instructions. One work this year captures this complexity: Waiting Room. It consists of a space held open for audiences as they queue to encounter Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy. Here, waiting and patience are not impediments but the architecture of the encounter. The in-between becomes a site of dwelling: a pause, a rest, a soft preparation for what follows. Softness here is not passive. It is a quiet agency. The work asserts rest, anticipation and readiness as political affects that elevate the value of slowness. Waiting Room positions healing not outside systems or spatial design but embedded within them, activated through shared time and collective presence.
IB: It feels like the right moment for Multiplay to address curatorial questions about the kind of impact it wants to make in exhibition-making. You’ve spoken of fluidity, connective tissue and tender support. What does the Multiplay mode of exhibition-making offer to existing artistic dialogues and formats in our immediate contemporary art scene? And how did the curatorial framework progress from Multiplay 01 to Multiplay 02?
T&T: We see artistic practices as warm spaces, places where things can grow and evolve organically. Not static objects, but processes that blossom into something like a fragrance or illumination that people absorb without being instructed how to experience it. When we think of systems, we often think of political hierarchies, bureaucratic structures that move in fixed orders, dictating bills, deadlines and calendars. Artistic practice is the only place that allows us to think otherwise, to stand between these rigidities. The tenderness in art makes things palpable, makes them flow, and allows for repair rather than restriction. This tenderness opens structures to support, care and nurture instead of disruption. The artists, ten this year and thirty-three last year, offered time and a willingness to examine the foundations of their practice instead of bringing commodities from their studios. Tallur had to confront what he truly wanted to do. Ala Younis attempted something she had not previously had space to try – inviting people to build play structures (Playgrounds). These gestures rarely unfold within conventional exhibition formats. The annotations with Liquidtext were an experiment. We did not shape it prematurely. By allowing it to remain organic, we learned far more. These frameworks are more porous than large-market exhibitions. They allow people to touch photographs, receive a book massage, even get a haircut! Everything becomes experiential, process-based and rooted in the in-between. What is offered is vulnerability rather than muscle, at least that is what we try.
IB: Design’s proximity to capitalism is often a difficulty. Immersion has been folded so smoothly into capitalist logic that sensory approaches other than the visual and cognitive are dismissed as lesser, as if the embodied were somehow less critical. This is a flawed assumption. Contemporary art is governed by hierarchies of the visual. Sight is privileged, all other senses orbiting the primacy of vision.
T&T: We are trying to unsettle that order in contemporary ‘visual’ art exhibition making. To move away from a visual-centric hierarchy and give equal ground to all the senses. Touch becomes crucial. It allows the body to think. By giving touch its due, we create a space where art can be encountered with a fuller sensorial intelligence. Touch is political. Sensory engagement has been absorbed by capitalist strategies of immersion that reinforce biases. We are hoping to counter this. In this sense, Multiplay becomes a sandbox for collective thinking and feeling.
Brings together over 11 artists and poets who remind us that the field of artistic imagination is a multiverse and that the multiplay framework can help us activate it.
Curated by
Salil Chaturvedi + Thukral and Tagra
Poems on the Move is an intimate and experimental poetic encounter that transforms a quintessentially mundane urban experience – a cab ride, into a journey of poetic discovery. We welcome all to the second year of live poetry readings and immersive recitations within moving shuttles, where verse is woven into the fabric of daily life. Here, the poetry is a companion on the road, blurring the lines between routine and reverie, solitude and connection. Speaking of love, longing, aspiration, and deep feelings, the idea is to create unique, transient spaces where individuals come together in unexpected moments of wonder, reshaping how we perceive both poetry and the urban journey.
Featuring:
Daras, Suchitra Choudhary, Nihal Parashar, Rochelle D’Silva, Mamata Verlekar
Bwanga “Benny Blow” Kapumpa (Lusaka) is a writer and conceptual artist whose ongoing research into Zambian traditional healers, “witchdoctors,” “witchcraft,” and allied practices seeks to open dialogue around indigenous knowledge systems and what they can teach us. He has exhibited at the National Art Gallery in Zambia, the Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) in Norway, and the Berlin Biennale in Germany. His writing has been published by the Caine Prize for African Writing, longlisted by the Afritondo Short Story Prize, and he was shortlisted for the Miles Morland Foundation scholarship twice.
Title of the work: Doctor Bwanga in Goa
Now in Panjim, Goa, he offers consultations through a subversive and futuristic phone-booth installation powered by an AI model trained on the artist’s own voice, psychological practice, and cultural knowledge systems. Through Zambian mystic arts and AI technology, Doctor Bwanga has transferred his “essence” into a spirit clone, an assistant who receives requests and offers counsel through a phone in the booth. Visitors step inside and call not a chatbot, but a digital entity designed to heal, guide, and navigate emotional turbulence. In an era where AI is shaped overwhelmingly by billionaires and Western technocracies, Bwanga reclaims the medium as a tool of care from the Global South, transforming the booth into a site of repair, an inversion of power and mythologies surrounding technology, where comfort and wisdom travel through cables and code.
Teja Gavankar (Mumbai) is a visual artist with a BFA from L.S. Raheja School of Art, Mumbai, and an MVA in Painting from M.S.U. Baroda. Her work explores the transformation of mundane spaces and objects, delving into spatial subjectivity, blending subjective and objective realities. She has exhibited internationally, with her first solo show at The Optica Centre for Contemporary Art in Montreal (2017), and participated in major group exhibitions like Sculpture By The Sea, Sydney, and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018). Teja has been part of several prestigious residencies, including at Khoj International Delhi, What About Art, Mumbai, and Vercale Art Centre, Laval, Canada. She received the Nasreen Mohamedi Award (2014) and the Space 118 Contemporary Residency Award (2020). Teja teaches Design at the Academy of Architecture and SEA College, KRVIA in Mumbai.
Title of the work: Breathe Gavankar creates a site of rest, a thatched structure that breathes with the presence of others. At its core sits a single bench, welcoming one person at a time. As the visitor sits and settles, the rocking bench transfers its weight to the structure, causing the entire form to gradually expand and contract. Those outside witness this gentle rise and fall, a visible breathing pattern triggered by the person within. Making it a collective lung, with no single person completing the work alone. One visitor sits, another watches, another waits, and another remembers. The breathing becomes a chain of care, passed from one body to the next. Breathe frames rest not as a pause but as a collaboration: a reminder that gentleness, shared time, and the support of others can transform space. In a world that often frames care as passive, Gavankar positions it instead as an active, spatial, and communal gesture.
Chunky Move (Melbourne) creates bold, genre-defying contemporary dance. Internationally renowned for ambitious and highly original work, the award-winning company maintains a reputation for being at the forefront of contemporary dance globally. Established in 1995, artists and audiences are at the heart of the company, expressed in a dense program of major works, commissions, residencies and education offerings. Over the last 30 years, Chunky Move has performed in 135 cities in 155 festivals throughout the world, captivating over 615K audiences.
Title of the work: You, Beauty
In You, Beauty, an undulating inflatable becomes a soft sculptural theatre visited by the audience. Performed by dancers Samakshi Sidhu and Enzo Nazario, the work is a surreal journey of love, beauty, and manipulation. Via the intimate nature of a duet, the two share a space, and the world seems to shrink around them in a dreamscape of offbeat romance. Throughout the performance, the inflatable warps and stretches, creating a dynamic play of ever-shifting material architecture. This form holds both audience and performer in an otherworldly space of song, dance, enchantment and dread.
Credits:
Concept, Direction & Choreography: Antony Hamilton Performers: Samakshi Sidhu & Enzo Nazario Lighting Design: Antony Hamilton & Ashley Buchanan Costume Design: Andrew Treloar Production Manager: Ashley Buchanan Executive Director and co-CEO, Chunky Move: Kristy Ayre
Presented by
Chunky Move and Asia TOPA, Arts Centre Melbourne
You, Beauty (Serendipity)
is supported by
The Centre for Australia-India Relations – Maitri Grant Program – an Australian Government initiative, the International Cultural Diplomacy Arts Fund and the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.
Alke Reeh (Düsseldorf)
lives and works in Germany, has participated in numerous exhibitions and received several grants, including a six-month residency in Mumbai in 2009 supported by the Art Foundation NRW. Her work has been shown widely, such as in Klassengesellschaft at Kirkeby Kapellen Museum Insel Hombroich, Konkrete Frauen at Museum Ahlen, Prussian Blue at KNMA Delhi curated by Dr. Arshia Lokhandwala, Of Mimicry, Mimesis & Masquerade at Bajaj Art Gallery Mumbai, Ausbruch aus der Fläche at Marta Herford Museum, Misk Art Festival in Riyadh, the Islamic Art Festival at Sharjah Art Museum, the Yinchuan Biennale Faster than Light curated by Bose Krishnamachari in China, talking between objects at Gyan Museum Jaipur, and déjà vu, Wege einer Form at Staatliche Museen Dresden Schloss Pillnitz.
Title of the work: Radiance (Model of a Glow)
Working with fabrics so technically precise and gently formed that they seem to hold light itself, Reeh traces beams and shadows within the cavernous histories of exhibition architecture, weaving tensile textiles that alter perceptions of depth, time, and illumination. Viewers are invited to slow down, walk, linger, and witness the choreography of light across cloth as her work becomes a soft system of attention, and holds it long enough to be felt, embodying sculpture, shelter, and reverie at once. In her practice, the fabric acts as a materialised placeholder for the fleeting medium of light: in a dim, dust-filled room, a confined yet intense beam becomes visible as a cone, much like a ray of sunlight piercing clouds and catching mist in its path. As layers of fabric overlap, transparency decreases while colour intensity and luminosity increase, creating a deceptive model, rather than making a target surface shine more brightly, the inner space of the fabric light cone becomes increasingly isolated, reversing the metaphor of “standing in the light”; instead of shining outward in glory, being widely visible and casting everything else into darkness, only the fabric itself glows, enclosing its interior within its own radiance.
Credits: Alke Reeh’s exhibit is supported byGoethe-Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan,New Delhi
Vinu Daniel (Bengaluru)
completed his B.Arch in 2005 from the College of Engineering, Trivandrum, following which he worked with Auroville Earth Institute for the UNDP Post-Tsunami construction. On returning from Pondicherry in 2007 he started ‘Wallmakers’ which was christened thus by others, as the first project was just a compound wall. Many eye-openers in the course of his practice prompted him to devote his energies to the cause of sustainable and cost-effective architecture.
Title of the work: Terra Grove
a first of its kind public permanent installation, is intentional in its build. Collaborating with Nirmiti Collective, a community of artisan potters, to make the architectural units to create this spatial shelter for the community of Miramar Beach, it hopes to renew the groundedness and relationship between the human and non human through the presence of terracotta.
A community building for a community, the choice of materiality is to be experienced wholeheartedly as it reconnects us to our soil. As mud in its essence is inherently human and alive, it constantly reminds us to stay in tandem with the pace of nature, and shapes our relationships to civilization and ourselves externally and internally. The units in the structure remind you of the Kulhads, or small clay cups, that are often seen strewn across the train tracks after their use. This project doesn’t just show the vastness of waste that is generated, but our ability to harness ingeniousness of traditional skill and knowledge systems to repurpose and reimagine the disposable into functional, durable structures to provide shade and respite for the passerby.
Collaborators: Nirmiti Collective Supported by Corporation of the City of Panaji, Entertainment Society of Goa and Goa Tourism, and Milton.
Jayasimha Chandrashekar (Bengaluru)
is an Artist and Master Printmaker whose work brings together situated knowledges of printing and its histories within the larger Indian context. He is interested in the infrastructures surrounding print technologies and culture while building an artist-run institution called Atelier Prati. In this space, which is considered a ‘social sculpture’ by the various well-known artists he collaborates with, he brings forth a unique blend of both experimentation and pedagogy. Jayasimha deeply cares about the nuances of class, labour and its complicated relationship with capitalism, information and other power structures. He currently teaches at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art and Design and is based in Bengaluru.
Title of the work: Every Day is a cliché,
Durational print performance. A performance on labour, intentionality and existence, by Jayasimha Chandrashekar, Master Printmaker and Founder of Atelier Prati, Bangalore. The love of repetition is in the truth, the only happy love. – Søren Kierkegaard. The way we frame the desperateness and the immediateness of everyday changes over time. The presence of this time-stamped, 200-year-old lithographic press, refurbished by the artist, is a celebration of Goa’s pioneering history of print and a testament to this art’s ability to lay the foundations of cities and culture. For the duration of Multiplay, he prints hundreds of newspapers daily, each on local newsprint and each stamped by the weight of artistic authorship. Visitors can take copies away, turning the exhibition into a living archive. The ongoing action questions truth, authorship, and authority in an age of misinformation, conspiracies, and instant news cycles. By titling every piece a cliché, Jayasimha reveals how repetition shapes belief: how printed text gains legitimacy simply through visibility, and how resistance might lie in slowing down the mechanics of production.
The Waiting Room
Speaking of soft systems, the waiting room itself is a tender space suspended between spectacles, a buffer of anticipation, anxiety, and accumulated time shared by people who never expected to stand together. In this pause, the room quietly conditions the senses, heightens vulnerability, and prepares the body for what is to come, so that by the time you enter Caravaggio’s Magdalene in Ecstasy, the emotional weight of the encounter lands with full force.
‘Multiplay’ serves as a sandbox for collective experiences, where multiple minds converge within a structured framework to nurture care, and inclusion and offer moments of respite. The interplay of roles between host, artist, and audience dissolves traditional boundaries between exhibition creators and viewers. Here, each work engages in an organic, dynamic process, with the artist as a facilitator, pollinating ideas that address social and political fragility and urgency. Each exhibition encourages participation, mirroring the complexities of our interconnected world. Artworks come alive through haptic interaction, and artwork’s evolution within a timeframe.
The idea of hosting conversations through play has been central to our thinking and practice in the past few decades. We often ask ourselves how to map art’s shifting relationship between the idea, the space, and the viewer. What spatial conditions can dismantle the existing norms of making and viewing an exhibition? Multiplay explores these questions with artists who have generously agreed to step out of their comfort zones to imagine a fresh set of situations. They invite us to model clay portraits in the dark, listen to the sounds of trees and birds, do book massages, and rest for resistance. They remind us of how the field of artistic imagination is a multiverse and how the framework of multiplay can help us activate it.
Thukral & Tagra, Delhi-based artist duo comprising Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra and familiar to some of us as T&T, have spent their career as artists reframing the boundaries of contemporary art. While their studio practice is driven by the artistic methodologies of painting, gaming, archiving, and publishing, their practice beyond the studio creates new formats of public engagement and attempts to expand the threshold of what art can do. For Serendipity Arts Festival 2024, T&T have put their curator’s hat on to configure ‘Multiplay’ – a culmination of practices that reimagine the roles of host, artist, and audience, fostering a dynamic, interactive space for artistic engagement.
Indranjan Banerjee (IB): How did you foreground ‘play’ as a curatorial premise for the Serendipity Arts Festival 2024? Why ‘Multiplay’?
Thukral and Tagra (T&T): ‘Multiplay’ as a verb lies at the core of the experience of this exhibition, where the boundary between artist and audience is purposefully blurred. This is much like the notion of play that has become central in our artistic practice. Having worked together for over two decades as a duo, we often find ourselves playing with ideas, passing them back and forth like a ball in a tennis match. Through time and practice, these ideas evolve, multiply, eventually becoming large enough to take flight.
With ‘Multiplay’, artists get the opportunity to craft new frameworks for participation, fostering an environment of care and inclusion. Here, artworks come to life through human interaction.
Multiplay is a dynamic process that allows the works to evolve into relational practices, employ satire, and possibly gives us the chance to reflect on the evolving and healing nature of participatory art, especially in the time of social and political urgencies.
For us, play is explored from various vantage points—psychological, cultural, even in the unknown! It allows us to free ourselves from preconceived notions of what art is or should be. For us, play is a way of forming relationships.
IB: Your imagination of the relationship between host, artist and audience is a dynamic one, with the artists becoming facilitators of play. How does the exhibition hold this dynamism?
T&T: The structure of the exhibition contains four key stakeholders — Serendipity Arts Foundation as the host, us as the curators, the artists, and the audience. They interact with one another, not as competitors, but as collaborators in exploring and presenting new ways of thinking.
While each has a defined role, this framework invites the possibility of reshuffling these positions. Could museum guards take on an active role in the creative process? Could the traditional role of the studio artist evolve into that of a facilitator, encouraging audiences to co-create and engage actively with the space? What new outcomes might emerge from shuffling these roles?
This approach aligns closely with the principles of relational art, where touching and interacting with the artwork fosters a more democratic and inclusive experience.
The dynamic interplay and elasticity between these roles open up avenues for innovation and fresh perspectives—precisely the kind of experimental spirit we aim to cultivate through ‘Multiplay’.
IB: How do you envision the public engaging with and navigating the exhibition?
T&T: The artist acts as a facilitator, pollinator, or game designer, creating a framework that allows viewers to become participants, or players to invest, fill, and add to the evolution of the work. Rather than controlling the outcome, the participant embraces and responds to the Instructions, akin to following the rules of a game.
We believe that participatory art transcends traditional norms of viewing, inviting audience members to step into the role of co-creator through instruction-based activations. Here, you don’t merely observe; you actively shape the artwork’s evolution within a timeline.
The audience is guided by a flow, but much like a river, its course cannot be fully controlled. To navigate this, we establish certain entry points, envisioning the audience as active participants who engage with and help activate the display of ideas.
We aim to expand how audiences perceive and interact with an exhibition. We reimagine the space as a sandbox—a cohesive whole with numerous moving parts, each evolving according to its own time-based, haptic, and inclusive instructions.
clay, wood, figurines, pigment,
Ala Younis research-led practice seeks instances where historical and political events collapse into personal ones. Through a multiplicity of voices, her work examines modern-day issues that inform visual and popular culture, such as nationalism, political alliances, social movements, global capital and personal and collective loss.
Project
This project encourages visitors to imagine their future playgrounds by engaging with structures and materials available through workshops. It is an invitation to build, play, and create forms that resonate with their understanding of land and community.
Instructions
Take a seat, and use the clay to build the playground in the given tray. Keep the work on the shelf, and wait till dry.
Franco Ariaudo has been undertaking transdisciplinary research on drawing, anthropology, sociology, ritualism, sports and the concept of leisure. Moving through these fields of interest, the artist investigates the social and anthropological projections that lead to the formation of a specific thought, be it an affirmation of a tradition or simply the expression of a cliché
Project
The Water Shoes are hybrid objects, emerging from the book as gymnastic devices. They occupy a space between the competitive and the spiritual, between surfboards and the Tables of the Law. They also represent an unsuccessful and desperate attempt to emulate the divine, forcing our earthly limits.
Instructions
Audience are invited to share drawing proposals for shoes to run on water. This attempt is to move beyond the forces of our earthly limits.
indigo, textile, film
Himanshu Shani with Adheep AK has co-founded 11.11, an organization deeply committed to the art of indigo natural dyeing. Their processes and methods restore traditional techniques and innovate new ways of working with natural dyes, particularly the indigo paste.
Project
Visitors are invited to paint the canvas with their feet as they walk over the indigo paste and move through the space while observing meditative silence.
Instructions
Visitors are invited to paint the canvas with their feet as they walk over the indigo paste and through the space while observing meditative silence.
cotton plants, film
Gurdeep Dhaliwal is a filmmaker based in a small village near Bathinda, Punjab. After completing his studies in English literature and creative writing in London, he returned to his village to explore and document various ecological realities of Punjab. Since 2017, he has been working on photographing symbols of mass migration from the state.
Project
Depicting the arduous life of cotton farmers in India, this film and installation is an attempt to raise awareness about the challenges faced by the farmers, including economic hardships, environmental issues, and the physical toll of their labour. The cotton plants hanging upside down from the roof refer to the precarity of a farmer’s everyday life in the country.
Instructions
By immersing visitors into the harsh and relentless world of cotton farmers, we aim to bring a glimpse of the life of a farmer who, against immense odds, labors to sustain the backbone of our textile industry.
wood, sound, books
Saurabh Dakshini’s passion for design, shaped during his upbringing, influenced by diverse spaces and materials: his grandfather’s colonial bungalow in Dehradun, homes in Chandigarh, and the multidimensional character of the cities of New Delhi & London, where he studied.
Project
A reading room is a sanctuary: dimly lit and clutter-free, with Chorão Island sounds. Shadows spill from a window, a tall bookshelf holds books on Goan plants, and connected rocking chairs with punkahs (fans) complete the tranquil setting.
Instructions
Enter. Step up to the third step of the bookshelf base. Pick up a book. Step down and pause. Choose a seat, breathe, and open the book to read.
clay & stone
L.N.Tallur uses sculpture, wall pieces, interactive work, and site-specific installations to expose the absurdities of everyday life and the anxieties that characterise contemporary society. His work incorporates handmade craftsmanship, found objects, and naturaland industrial materials correlating traditional and current-day customs.
Project
This workshop is designed to awaken and enhance your 6th sense. The immersive experience will guide you through deliberately blocking one of your senses, prompting your brain to rewire and amplify your other senses—sound, taste, smell, and touch.
Instructions Deliberately blocking one sense triggers the brain to adapt and amplify the remaining senses.
waste matter from the sea
Rachna Toshniwal An artist and environmentalist. Her artwork is an enquiry into how we are connected/disconnected from nature. Art becomes an opportunity to pause, contemplate, and reflect. What emerges is a bridge which can evoke a similar reflection in the viewer/participant.
Project
The project was devised as a community art project at Saaral Beach, Alibaug, Maharashtra. Working with over twenty women of the Nari_Shakti Samuh Self-Help group of the coastal village of Navkhar, the artist created large tapestries woven with waste materials collected from the local beach.
Instructions
These sculptural objects, tapestries, and macramé made from waste represent our connection to the ocean.
sound, PVC Foam Board, rope
Tania El Khoury is a live artistwho creates interactive installations and performances that explore collective memory and solidarity. Her work incorporates tactile, auditory, and visual materials transformed through audience interaction. Addressing displacement, border systems, privatization, and the politics of space, her art examines their ties to nation-building and colonial legacies.
Project
Memory of Birds takes place simultaneously on seven trees and runs for about 40 minutes with seven audience members each hour at different times in the day. This interactive audio installation and performance explores the ideas of trauma, migration, state violence, and soil toxicity.
Instructions
Explores political violence that literally and figuratively gets buried in contested lands. A guided somatic experience, Memory of Birds is a work that eats itself, designed to be forgotten.
research, public engagement
Social Design Collaborative is an art and architectural practice based in Delhi that works on inclusion in the built environment, from gender parity in public spaces to housing rights. They work with community-based organizations, social workers, activists, academics, lawyers and government organizations, bringing together diverse stakeholders.
Project
Travelling Balcaos is an itinerant public art installation to create conversations in Goa’s public spaces, focussing on community, identity and belonging in the rapidly changing urban landscape. The installation shares the diversity of the voices from across the city, connected by the common thread ofmigration and dualism of home.
Instructions
The project opens the public space to create a local collective voice. See if you can spot them on their journey across the Main market, Kadamba bus stand and the Promenade!
sofa, drawing, cream
Sarnath Banerjee has written five graphic novels and teaches visual narrative at the University Der Kunst, Berlin. His work has been shown in several national and International biennales. He has been commissioned by the London Olympics to do a series of billboards across London titled The Gallery of Losers. He is co-founder of the publishing house Phantomgarh.
Project
Central to the exhibition space is a sofa, from where one can complain. The rants then become drawings. The drawings are splattered on the wall, the tables are filled with half-made zines, the floor is strewn with discarded papers, and in the middle of all this sits Chainpreet’s Sofa.
Instructions
Let’s save Ms. Kaur, let’s give her Normaline, a lanolin-based cream, which when rubbed on one’s chest every night helps tolerate multiple forms of repression, unfairness, bigotry, and discrimination.
walk, movement, चलना
Resting Museum – Priyanka D’Souza and Shreyasi Pathak are an artist duo who work with ideas of rest, queerness, and disabilityas a methodology in their art projects. They intervene in dominant historical discourses of history through the performativity of the missing body in disability theory and how they can be used in institutional and infrastructural critique.
Project
Bipedal walking in humans is considered so common that the word, ‘pedestrian,’ is understood as ordinary. However, to “walk” in many cultures is figuratively equated with living and thriving like the Hindi word, ‘चलना’, which can mean to work or to happen—used as an animating term for non-living objects or situations.
Instructions
These site-specific works draw attention to the infrastructures that enable, restrict, direct, and prohibit various forms of human movement.
water, photograph
Farheen Fatima work explores the themes of nostalgia and complexities that govern human longing for tenderness. Through her lens, she meditates on these themes and finds her voice. Project At Sukhna Lake (Chandigarh), celebrate the rhythms of everyday life as an antidote to relentless productivity. Inspired by Pahari Miniature paintings, which depict serene moments and deep connection with nature, the
project
explores how public spaces like Sukhna Lake foster reflection and belonging.
Instructions
Move gently where the water cradles us, attuned to the play of light, water, and glass. Touch each box, let the ripples echo the lake’s quiet rhythms.
game, wishes, entities
Rai’s work integrates found materials, weathering, and elements of fiction, intertwining research with personal experiences to reflect on the changing conditions of the spaces or passages she inhabits.
Project
Search Party allows visitors to examine objects layered with traces—some visible, others concealed. The space is rendered into a game of tactile hide and seek.
Instructions
Visitors are invited to plot a wider network of yearnings, inclinations, wishes, and visions within these marks and begin to remember entities that exist neither on land nor at sea.
sound
Talvin Singh is an English musician, producer, and composer. A tabla player, he is known for creating an innovative fusion of Indian classical music with drum and bass. Singh is generally considered involved with an electronica subgenre called Asian Underground, and more recently as Indian and/or Asian electronica.
Project
Ragas and classic compostions have been associated with seasons and nature for the expression and apreciation of supreme beauty of our envioremnt. The romantasim of celebrating season takes a turn today with the global emengency in climate change and the shifts in ecosystem in our world today. This invites a sense of dichotomy to this ancient narrative and it,s symbios of season and music in indian classical music and poetry.
Instructions
Take a seat, immerse yourself in the sound— the sound of Saawan echoing through a time of catastrophe.
machines, AI, rice
Shailesh BR received his BFA in painting from CAVA, Mysore, followed by a PG Diploma in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda (India). His practice is deeply rooted in philosophy and seeks to explore the fundamental aspects of our world, such as existing knowledge, systems, traditions, rituals, metaphysics, and philosophy itself.
Project
Human intelligence has traveled far—from flat-earth beliefs to real-time world maps, ancient rituals, and machines that think. Along this journey, we have constantly questioned reality, sometimes finding clarity and other times contradictions. Let’s Make A Choice (Swayamvara) reflects on our evolving understanding of existence, where philosophy, technology, and tradition intersect.
Instructions
Take the chance—you might be the one. Everyone is welcome! If not now, perhaps in another life.
objects
CONA Foundation is run by Shreyas, Hemali and their 9-year-old daughter Janaa. Currently, CONA is home at Divar Island, Goa. Since 2012, CONA has been instrumental in bringing young practitioners from various backgrounds to its physical space. It has encouraged them to stay, work and be a part of the mundaneness of the space. This artist-led space has conducted and held space for various mentorship programs, workshops, exhibitions and gatherings in discourses of visual arts, literature, cinema, food, music, architecture, and farming.
Project
CONA projects propose an exhibitionin two parts. Part 1 – DIORAMA OF AN EXHIBITION: A WINDOW S.H.O.P – at the Old GMC venue is a window display of a shop that is not yet open. Contribution from various individuals who have passed through CONA form the objects at Display in the Diorama. The display will be open for 144 hours. The shop may or may not open in those 144 hours. Part 2 – DWELLING FOR A DIORAMA, is open at the CONA Foundation in Divar Island.
Instructions
The visitor is invited to see the display and wish for the desired object on the display. The display will open for 144 hours. The shop may or may not open in those 144 hours. The CONA foundation space on Divar Island is open to visitors to engage with multiple workshops and day sessions happening in sync with the domestic pace of CONA’s home.
terracota
Vinu Daniel Vinu Daniel completed his B. Arch in 2005 from The College of Engineering, Trivandrum, following which he worked with Auroville Earth Institute for the UNDP Post-Tsunami construction. On returning from Pondicherry in 2007 he started ‘Wallmakers’ which was christened thus by others, as the first project was just a compound wall. Many eye-openers in the course of his practice prompted him to devote his energies to the cause of sustainable and cost-effective architecture.
Project
An organic form built in terracotta resembling a species flows around the Panjim beach. First-of-its-kind permanent public installation conceived as part of the festival, this project signifies the horizontal relationships between the human and non-humans.
Instruction
A large-scale form built with terracotta acts as shelter and respite for the passerby. Inviting them to take a break and reflect at the beach
annotation
Indranjan Banerjee is a writer, curator and cultural producer based between India and the UAE; he is also the exhibitions curator at the Jameel Arts Centre. Experiments in writing, writing in transmission and acts of annotation are his writerly fixations. As an artist his interest is in the body as a vessel to hold memory and withhold borders. You can find him staring at the horizon, plotting strategies of worldbuilding and modes of remembering.
Project
Liquidtext is an evolving text organism that supplements a static curatorial statement with a fluid web of tangents and associations. Performing as para-textual annotations, it animates the exhibition with handwritten text, creating a dynamic score that extends the curatorial and performative potential of an exhibition site.
Instructions
Locate the text at the margins of the curatorial statement in the exhibition. Let the score choreograph your flow in the space. Remember, Liquidtext is templural.
objects, salon
Pollinator.io an interdisciplinary lab founded in 2017 by Thukral and Tagra, fostering cross-pollination in contemporary culture. Currently led by principal investigator Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, it supports innovative projects that transcend traditional art practices, enriching South Asia’s cultural landscape and the global arts community.
Project
Hate/Concern reflects two opposing sentiments shaping our consciousness in these turbulent times. In response to the volatile social climate and the rising tide of injustice, Nafrat/Parvah – A Salon, a seven-day festival offering reflection and renewal.
Instructions
Bring something you “hate” to exchange for a service. Share your reason for submission. Wait in the lounge to redeem a service of care.
massage chairs, sound
Pollinator.io an interdisciplinary lab founded in 2017 by Thukral and Tagra, fostering cross-pollination in contemporary culture. Currently led by principal investigator Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, it supports innovative projects that transcend traditional art practices, enriching South Asia’s cultural landscape and the global arts community.
Project
The BOOK MASSAGE invites visitors to sit and choose a massage from the menu specially crafted for the audience to experience by listening and getting a massage. Here, audiences can listen to the voices of ten authors, whose knowledge is a form of grounding, invites introspection and provides comfort.
Instructions
The space is an infirmary or sanatorium, offering a restorative space for reflection and healing.
© Thukral and Tagra Studio 2025