Retracing Home / LOPF 2026

Retracing Home
in Moments of Being

Anuj Daga

reflection upon the works of artists who presented at the London Original Print Fair 2026

Co-curated by Asha Vaidyanath and Shivangi Ladha, 14 - 17 May 2026
participating artists Benjamin Deakin, Kumari Khushboo, Shivangi Ladha, Ian Malhotra, Radha Pandey, Jo de Pear, Mila Rae Sarabhai, Scherry Shi, Nalinakshya Talukdar, Asha Vaidyanath, Adia Wahid

Home is an unsettling territory. In a world marked by accelerated change, migration, and the turbulence of war and displacement, home becomes less a stable destination than an evolving condition—something lost, carried, rebuilt and reimagined. The question of home is one that art continually returns to, perhaps because home itself is never fixed. At the London Original Print Fair 2026, the India Printmakers’ House brings together eleven artists whose works expand ways of imagining dwelling in distance. To dwell is to make meaning of one’s situational and material choreography, and orient oneself to new coordinates of being in time. In this cohort, the artists broadly articulate their works under the themes of landscape as memory, environment as time, exploring location and setting and lastly those that connect to the deeper structures of the self.


Landscape as Memory

Scherry Shi, Landings I, 2026, Cyanotype, 39.9 x 39.9 cm

The faint fluidity of skies and waters of her hometown are encapsulated in the noir cyanotypes of Scherry Shi as she takes us in a dream-like landscape of memory. Printed through light on generations old handkerchiefs of her friend’s grandmother, the artist explains how “embroidered handkerchief is one of a few personal properties that women could keep for themselves as assets in history, especially in patriarchal China.” As we observe distinct moments of a quiet wooden bridge over a lake, or the space between two apartment buildings framing the sky through the domestic life oozing out of their windows, we realise that these hold special place within the memoryscape of the artist. The artworks are then daydreams on a veil - a translucent window through which we are teleported into another world that is distant, but brings it close.

Radha Pandey, Artist Book, Deeptime, 2017

Radha Pandey’s work crafts contours onto paper to fold an eroding topography of the mountains and the water bodies onto each other. The works in themselves are cross-sections of time where in the rise and fall of sea levels and shifting terrains become more apparent. Presented in the form of a book, these artworks allude to hidden knowledge revealed only during the close reading of these specific chapters. It is here that the printed letters beyond a veil of colour become visible, demanding a discovery of a lost world. The contours lines drawn in pencil around these three textures attempt to bring the sky, water and land onto an equal plane of cartographic reading, making us conscious about the fragility and precarity of landscapes in the face of climate change.

Nalinakshya Talukdar, Unsearch Home, 2023, Woodcut, 120 x 65 cm

Coming from Assam, Talukdar imagines inhabiting nature as his home where the skies, woods and waters meet, creating multiple crevices between their thresholds to offer experiences of nature, in one’s private hiding. However, interjecting each other in colour and form, where the continuities of contours are disrupted, the artists suggest the disjunctures that modern life brings about through man made acts. Mountains fold within themselves the woods that eventually lend resources to construct modest homes. At the same time, the mountain ice melts into its rivers - an idyllic ecological landscape appears continuous yet disjunct in the artist's prints.

 
Environment as Time

Ian Malhotra, Waterfall I, 2026, Etching, 82 x 57 cm

Ian Malhotra and Jo de Pear traverse time through their print creations as they bring us to inhabit spaces that could be culturally shared or deeply personal. For instance, The Waterfall series of Ian Malhotra creates a clever LED-screen like illusion through the older etching technique. Malhotra makes innumerable fine vertical lines through his work that not only slice the image into extremely small parcels, but also begin to lend the water its essential “fall” in the print. The image is held in the tension of the hard and the soft, the dark and light, the solid and fluid through a mere orchestration of the horizontal and vertical lines of the composition. Moreso, the etched lines bring a destabilising depth to the movement of water, alluding to the early screen animations of waterfalls. In retro-technologizing of image, Malhotra makes us dive into multiple representational worlds that we may have seen across over centuries, in a single glance.

Jo de Pear, Echinoidea I, 2025, Photopolymer, 64 x 54 cm

Jo de Pear invites us to take a microscopic look at the surface of the sea urchin - something that she has been observing and collecting through the encouragement of her biologist mother since childhood. Following the obsession of the early naturalists of the 1800s, the artist produces substantial cyanotypes using hard-touch photopolymer prints that expose the hidden patterns and geometries that might escape the breezing gaze. By holding time in the enlargement of these shells, de Pear produces an immersive landscape that allows the viewer to escape into another world, much like her own self. She admits, “I sort of look at them as like lunar landscapes, the bumpy surface.” The collapse of scale and time within the work of the print allows the artist (and eventually the viewer) to parse distant geographies and experiences within a single moment.

 
Of Location and Setting

Mila Rae Sarabhai, Endless, 2025, Photopolymer, 37 x 27 cm

Using photopolymer etching, Mila Rae Sarabhai captures everyday moments from her hometown in the city of Ahmedabad (India) onto paper. The close reading of the photographs turned into prints in bare black and white focus on form and light that are forever frozen in time. As architecture, people and shadows merge in the monochromaticism of these granular prints, they evoke a soft feeling of ruin and decay. The prints highlight the disintegrating particles of matter, merely held together in time. These impressionistic flashes of a place remain as a fading trace of memory within which the mind is allowed to wander slowly.

 

Benjamin Deakin, Calibrator, 2022, Pigment print, 50 x 58 cm

Positioning the viewer inside a mountain-top house and inviting them to sit before a stunning view of ice-covered peaks, bringing them to rest their hands on a kitschy, plastic-covered dining table and eyes drifting to half-closed yellow curtains—Benjamin Deakin highlights the stark contrast between the pristine landscape outside and the garish domestic interior. It is as if we are placed in a moral confrontation between the natural and the manmade. But the narrative flips if we imagine this picturesque view existing only as a framed photograph inside the home. Then the wall decorations, curtains, and table covers begin to feel like extensions of a distant, beautiful landscape absorbed into the clutter of everyday life. These shifting, mirroring relationships are thoughtfully rendered through his use of pigment print and acrylic on paper. The future and the past murkily reflect within the unclear transparency of the plastic sheet on the dining table onto which the artist invites the viewer to sit upon and ponder.

 

Km. Khushboo, The Way of Living, 2024, Etching, 53 x 66 cm

Khushboo Kumari’s etching on paper engages with the ways in which individuals make and remake boundaries around them to be able to define their own world. The frugal, sublime and gentle form of this enclosure suggests the soft and flexible nature in which it imagines containment that is bound to evolve and change. A single opening apparent on the layered surface leaves room for the other to enter or the self to depart. Yet, the tension of the space inside remains in suspense and compactly held within the architecture of the fence. Her work acknowledges how both - the location and the self - constantly make and remake each other and remain in a state of flux.

Adia Wahid, The Glyph I, 2026, Hand carved wood blocks, 12x16 cm

In the work of Adia Wahid, patterns unfold as both structure and speculation, reassembling into fields of quiet complexity. Her visual language draws from a kind of mathematical syntax, where forms do not merely repeat but evolve through their encounters. Shapes overlap, interlock and generate new configurations, suggesting a world composed not of singular orders but of multiple, coexisting logics. There is something proto-Escheresque here—not in illusion, but in the recursive play of form, where each intersection becomes a site of invention. Hidden syntaxes emerge in the meeting of two geometries, as if each form carries a latent script that only becomes legible in relation to another. Wahid’s practice dwells in these moments of interaction where order meets deviation, and where the space compresses and releases into new worlds.

Asha Vaidyanath, Love Letter II (longing), 2026, UV Print on handwoven paper, 35 x 30.5 cm

Asha Vaidyanath splits the solidity of the image as she prints them on loosely woven linen making reality vulnerable. As they fragment and slip through the gaps of the woven fibre, the images become more delicate and fragile. This breaking is not a rupture but a methodical outcome of the weave’s systemic construction, exposing the fragility within systems themselves. The work evokes a sense of bandaging—are these surfaces holding a broken world together, or allowing it to stay apart? In either case, they permit permeability, letting things pass through the medium, while situating the image within a subtle, underlying grid. Strands of linen at the ends of the cloth sometimes left loose suggest a compulsive coming together towards the making of new world in Vaidyanath’s imprinted imageries.

Shivangi Ladha, In The Fold of Night, 2025, Etching, 84 x 124 cm

Shivangi Ladha, In Her Movement Sky Remembered II, 2025, Monoprint, 49 x 58 cm

How many varied selves does the body contain? Shivangi’s works often evoke a dialogue between the individual and the collective, the self and the other, and the other within the self. When one looks at her etched aquatint, a seemingly singular body appears to be looped into a state that simultaneously awakens to consciousness and slips into a dream. It is in these repetitive acts that we process the manifest world, where the home appears between the real and the imaginary. Is this the same body, or merely the accumulation of collective consciousness of several bodies? The self extends into the environment to make it a part of this very home, where bodies cling to each other to embrace and protect the silent world around. In its unique pairing of the two works, one is compelled to rethink the contemporary and figure the right state to witness it. Which pasts and which presents must one inhabit? Which time and which place shall we afford to exist? Ladha’s works keep pushing us to think about these questions constantly in relation to the world at large.

Taken together, these eleven practices remind us that home is not simply where one begins, nor only where one arrives. It is an ongoing act of composition—made through memory and forgetting, through landscapes altered by time, through objects carried across borders, and through the fragile architectures of the self. In printmaking especially, where impressions are transferred, layered, repeated and reversed, the medium itself becomes an apt metaphor for dwelling in the contemporary world: identities are pressed by history, marked by movement, and continually re-formed through contact. If displacement defines much of our present moment, these artists respond not with nostalgia alone, but with invention. They show that home can survive as trace, as question, as relation and as a space still being made.

***

On Language in AI

This morning which I asked ChatGPT to edit a piece of my paragraph, it flattened its tone, complexity and density altogether. I was quick enough to point it out to the bot, and it was quite self critical. It said:

Many editing models—human and AI alike—are trained to assume that ambiguity is a problem to be solved. They tend to move toward clarity, linearity, and explicit causality. But in certain kinds of writing, ambiguity is not a flaw; it is the intellectual and affective work of the text.

This was reassuring as it echoed what my Yale advisor Eeva Liisa Pelkonen also brought to my notice after reading and interacting with me and my work during my masters; she had advised, "Channel your ambiguity in your writing." Not only did she realise that my doubtful voice was a form of thinking itself, but she also validated it as a powerful tool to produce discourse. I have often wondered how people - intelligent or otherwise become overtly assertive about their thoughts. I believe that the intelligent must know that there is more (to) knowledge beyond what they know, and the other has to know that they are asserting to hide their ignorance or in lack of knowing something. In such a scenario, how can assertion create any ground for productive thought-exchange? Arguments, debates, and reasoning happen precisely in this space of ambiguity, which allows us to challenge what we already know, or expand our thoughts into something we do not know. Does it then become a prerogative only of the curious minds to engage and sustain uncertainty?  ChatGPT further explains studying the past patterns in my writing:

The uncertainty is not incidental—it is the subject of the reflection. To resolve that ambiguity is to alter the thought itself.

The transitions are not fully explained. They are associative rather than argumentative. A conventional editor might ask for clearer links, but the gaps themselves create meaning. They allow the reader to inhabit the process of thinking rather than merely receive its conclusions. 

That 'ambiguity' alters thought is precisely the dialectical reasoning in action through a singular agency. It produces a stream of reflection in which all thoughts are constantly under scrutiny. This kind of writing does not burden itself with citations, rather indexes back to its own past experience, or its lack thereof, constantly invoking consciousness of thought. This is one way of producing knowledge. The Vedics arrived at their version of truth of external reality through disciplined practice of interrogation of the (inner) self. The Western tradition, on which the idea of knowledge largely rests today, tries to use the body as an instrument to arrive at an objective description of reality by minimizing the reliance of the self.  

Eventually ChatGPT told me what I consciously do:

Your writing often seems to think through language rather than merely report conclusions. The sentence is not just carrying an idea; it is exploring it. 

The simultaneous interrogation of thought and language is one within which I exercise meaning. In negotiating the various vectors of meaning within a singular word, I condition my text to hold more than an simple unilateral idea. This is the work of writing, and the task of labour. More importantly, it is conscious work at play - such that any piece of writing becomes accessible, or meaningful to a larger body of people. In other words, one must create multiple entry points within one's writing to expand its sphere of engagement, and influence. Thus, when I responded to the bot: "I like to make my sentences layered and dense with meaning often times rather than dumbing them down like scientific papers. I think that is also one of the dimensions of humanities work right?"; it went on to explain:

One of the distinctive features of much humanities writing is that language is not treated as a transparent vessel carrying information. Language is itself part of the inquiry. The sentence does not merely communicate a thought that already exists; it participates in the production of thought.

In many scientific disciplines, the ideal sentence aspires to be unambiguous, replicable, and resistant to multiple interpretations. Ambiguity is often considered noise because it interferes with the transmission of information.

Many strands of humanities scholarship, however, begin from the premise that the world itself is ambiguous, layered, and resistant to singular explanations. In that context, a sentence may deliberately sustain multiple possibilities because the object of study demands it. 

In the recent past, and recurrently, I have argued for institutional discourse to be more interpretive rather than instructional. The convening of the Graduate Symposium SEA 'Doubts' was to bring ambiguity to the centrestage of academic discourse. Incidentally, 'Noise Fields' was another Annual Conference thematic I had conceived for SEA, where noise was the metaphor to hold polyphonic perspectives together. In the subsequent year where SEA Annual Conference was on the subject of how must institutions grow together, I had presented along with Prasad the case for institutions to be situated amidst interpretive landscapes rather than between walls. The debate of all these ideas in their humanities spectrum and their odds with how traditional scientific discipline orders and utilises language is then quite revealing. It means that my endeavour has been to open up the overtly scientific underpinnings of what constitutes knowledge and bringing them under the purview of ambiguity. In analysing my ways of approaching writing further, ChatGPT says:

What I find interesting in your writing is that it seems to emerge from a tradition that sits somewhere between academic prose and essayistic reflection. It reminds me less of conventional social science writing and more of writers who use prose as a space for thinking—people who allow sentences to carry uncertainty, memory, atmosphere, and concept simultaneously.

The challenge for such writing is not to become clearer at all costs. The challenge is to ensure that every ambiguity is doing work.[...]

And I suspect that what you are often pursuing is not obscurity but what one might call semantic abundance—the feeling that a sentence contains more than can be exhausted in a single reading. That is very much a recognizable aspiration within many traditions of humanities writing, and it is one of the reasons certain essays, catalog texts, and theoretical works reward rereading decades after they were written.

 And the above, has been my pursuit, like mentioned before. I really like the conceptualisation of 'semantic abundance' - for writing to be able to hold multiple meanings at once. I have always found the 'allegorical' form in literary texts the most fascinating, after metaphor and pun. The allegorical in writing is the most artful way of being political, or rather, most political way of being artful...Here, language works like a chameleon, changing colours in cascading contexts - camouflaging, yet out there, hidden yet visible. In employing this, language becomes mirror - "Do we see the same person in the mirror every day?", Eeva had very early on asked me. Despite that mirror is simply doing its work like it has always done, it is at the same time presenting a different picture of us, only if we are willing to see. And it is here, that writing becomes a work of art, which the mathematical models of AI may never be able to calibrate accurately...for it is only the human mind that knows what ghosts to project for the dreams of the future. 

Opolis at 25 / The _Opolis Lexicon

The _Opolis Lexicon

To be sure, one of the first impulses of the _Opolis alumni on receiving this booklet would be to look for the project that they may have worked on during their term at the office. Between images and texts, our eyes will roll between the lines that one of us may have repeatedly drafted on the computer. And in absorbing those lines, we may remember the discussions, deliberations, differences that have now settled not merely on these pages, but also in space. This book is much more than just a memoir or an intermittent archive, but a record of the collective efforts of twenty five years of “homing” by Opolis. In appreciating them, we may perhaps begin to observe certain values that now dwell in our own consciousness, our way of world-making.

To begin an architectural practice in a rapidly globalising city at the onset of a new millennium comes with its own challenges. The lure of the market, the risk of “missing out”, the seduction of shimmer, the lurch of luxury - have been the global forces that have fundamentally influenced most architectural practices during the last three decades of transforming India. As fellow participants in parsing this transformation, we may observe how Opolis lends its lexicon in attending to these forces with a contemplative stillness. The houses from geographies presented here, shaped within a forest of global choices over the last two-and-a-half decades, invite us to consider three vantage points, amongst others, from which we may choose to look back while thinking ahead in our own respective practices of spacemaking:

1. Holding the Ground

The ridge is not merely a topographical condition rather an philosophical indulgence in the works of Opolis. Many houses consciously sited along this line where two surfaces meet at an angle, do not seek attention; instead they firmly hold the ground behind them. Built as large retaining walls, the houses then appear to reserve the ground while descending us into a large open shelter on the other side. With no real “insides”, they become architectural acts of conservation. Could these be gestures of impressing oneself firm into landscapes of transition while bringing us to quietly contemplate upon the openness ahead?


2. Alignments and Deviations

Within plotted properties, the projects often establish a primary axis along which subsidiary spaces are distributed, offering a sense of order and orientation. This axial ordering is complemented by deviating roofs and deflecting walls that subtly resist alignment, introducing moments of departure within the plan and section. The axis, in this sense, functions less as a fixed directive and more as a guiding force—one that invites return rather than demands obedience. Does this dynamic tension between structure and drift serve as a compass for addressing the architectural contemporary?


3. The Open Alcove

By pushing and pulling walls, the houses offer different degrees of containment, while remaining open. Within the domestic schema, most projects demonstrate an architectural mediation of the western fireplace and the oriental tokonoma into an recessed room that is receptacle for the intermediaries of everyday life. Taking different forms within the inside and outside, these spaces become open alcoves, reversing the gaze within, and serve as internal windows into our own lived realities/lives.


When seen through the above lenses, the twenty-five homes and their drawings not only bring us together in our respective interactions with Opolis, but also revisit the values shared and learnt silently from the practice. Many of our thoughts got realigned to a certain modernist ethos assimilated by the practice from various masterful experiences from across the globe. The focus on showcasing only houses is not to overlook the important institutional and urban spaces that the firm has designed, rather celebrates architecture’s primary purpose of homing. If we must collectively look at these houses, and their drawings as an intellectual enterprise, we may be able to trace the distinct strands we carry ahead in our own practice. Ultimately, the compilation gestures to twenty-five years of professional companionship and familiarity - direct or indirect - that informs a small corner of our conceptual home.


- Anuj Daga

still (in parenthesis)

a note on exhibition of works by Prabodh Parikh

Parentheses are punctuation marks invented to denote supplemental, secondary or sidelined information in language and logic. Much of this supplemental information actually contains the “stuff” of life - that we try to make meaning of. Foregrounding these marginal gestures, this exhibition brackets a few sets of visual experiments by Prabodh Parikh crystallizing the inquisitive restlessness of a mind nourished amidst a fertile environment of artists, philosophers, poets, writers and architects over the last five decades. Working with lines and colour, mediums dry and wet, on canvases small and large, the artist generates uneven geographies of the mind within which quiet figures appear gently reposed. One sees the desire to anchor the anxiety of emergent formlessness of the drawn matter by discreet anthropomorphic punctuations that allude them as bodies or movements, made legible to the gestaltic eye. This compulsion to form an image within abstraction demonstrates the struggle to resolve (and yet remain with) the chaos of everyday life. 

The body in these abstractions traverse several states of existence - from elemental to elaborate. While loosely (dis)entangled lines sometimes themselves come together in entropic densities, at other times they sit quietly onto noisy backgrounds. Figures once alone/unattended slowly morph and coalesce into allied bodies, at other times, their communality awaits sublimation within the canvas. Through these  subtle distinctions and dissolutions, they invite the viewer into subtle acts of meditation. The drawings then are quiet interruptions, still in parentheses, that must be accommodated amid the rhythmic  choreography of a routined experience. These are conscious and subconscious states of being that map the  journey of the individual to belong to the community, and return back only to become an individual. What shapes does such travel morph us into?

The placement of a parenthesis can significantly alter the meaning of a proposition, revealing how peripheral thought comes to silently shape the centre. Parentheses hold implications, intonations, inflections, and the excesses of meaning without which the primary content is susceptible to lose its context. We often bracket aspects that are integral to life yet remain unspoken, treating them as provisional - information  that is essential but suspended. Having moved from doodles on the margins to drawings on canvases, the works in this exhibition suggest what is ostensibly marginal may be constitutive, and that meaning resides as much in the bracketed aside as in the main text. They preserve inner ideas as addenda, safeguarding what cannot be fully absorbed into the linear flow of literature or life. To engage with such subtleties requires not only seeing them with the inner eye, but learning to remain with them: the challenge is to be there, still.

Artful Mergings: Print and Place / London Original Print Fair 2025

 

Tracing Roots Through Prints: India Printmaker House at London Original Print Fair 2025
by Anuj Daga
April 25, 2025

published in India Art Review online journal

Link: https://indiaartreview.com/stories/tracing-roots-through-prints-india-printmaker-house-at-london-original-print-fair-2025/

ORIGINAL TEXT

Artful Mergings: Print and Place
Anuj Daga

(How) do traces of one’s roots find their way in one’s artistic work? This is the question that prompted India Printmaker House to bring together a group of seven artists at the London Original Print Fair 2025 from India and the UK Indian diaspora. The tightly curated show featuring prints by artist Shivangi Ladha, Ian Malhotra, Mahima Kapoor, Avni Bansal, Rewati Shahani, Saruha Kilaru, and Jaimini Jariwala at the Somerset House between 20-23 March 2025 opened up a host of means and methods through which questions of identity, belonging and memory of cultural past may be gestured in artistic practice. In creating such a landscape, this exhibition not only foregrounded contemporary experiments in printmaking by young artists but also strategized a channel for cross-border connections and collaborative exchanges.

Born to a family that fled from Pakistan to Mumbai during partition, Rewati Shahani continued to live in London after studying Fine Art at the Central St. Martins. She expresses the shift in her own space-time coordinates in her minimalist screen prints that impress translucent maplike cut out forms on solid rectangular opaque bases. At once, these appear like irregular stones placed on a planar surface. In overlapping these, she mixes up their characteristic values of the heavy and light, organic and geometric, natural and manmade, alluding the sedimented geography of a location to leak into a distant ephemerality of the horizon. In counter positioning the land and the sea thus, her works ask if horizons are mere imaginary datums or places may find their real geographies ever? In doing so, the work begins to speak of the location of culture as it moves through bodies and borders. 

London-based artist Ian Malhotra plays with the real and virtual in his ‘Monday-Sunday’ series where he etches videogame midnight skies onto paper. He explains, ‘[q]uite a lot of open world video games have diurnal cycles for realism, so the light and weather changes throughout the day as the character walks through the landscape…When the game's diurnal cycle arrived at exactly midnight, I took a picture of this sky.’ Referencing these frames in his sketches, Malhotra makes his canvas black, converting it into a digital screen, further marking white luminous lines to render the cloudy skies. The folding of the past over the present occurs in Malhotra’s works at multiple registers. The mass circulating virtual images are etched exactly in the manner of the imaginary landscapes etched by noted Western artists, eventually reproduced by print for mass consumption - highlighting the fundamental space-time dichotomy of engaging with images. Moreover, the endlessness of the sky and the screen - the two infinities that have united humanity historically as well as in contemporary times - find a common ground in Malhotra’s canvas.

Mixing of forms occurs through the deployment of transparency in Saruha Kilaru’s non-figurative  prints on a variety of  surfaces such as glass, ceramics, fabrics, sequins and paper. Kilaru carries forward the aesthetics of watercolour renderings in print, wherein colour-forms get defined by material textures. Her works invite us to enjoy the shapes that liquids take in resisting external forces, in turn acting like a stretched elastic membrane themselves due to the cohesive forces between fluid particles. The glimmering surfaces of Kilaru’s prints attract the viewer's attention to the constant slippage between light and colour, animating surface tension as impressionistic work of art itself. 

Mahima Kapoor’s prints allude to magnified images of environmental contamination as seen under a microscope. Strains of entropic bodies - those that appear foreign to each other - coexist within a single frame in her artworks. Her series ‘A Place of Oasis’ seems to be a snapshot of polluted wasteland that holds organic and inorganic matter decaying together, making us consider discordant colours and temporalities in simultaneity. In making the viewer stare at these, Kapoor discomforts the onlooker while surfacing the unwelcome chemistry of decomposition. She thus charts a map of pollution at different scales, inducing an affectual response to the chemical, biological and allergenic processes that are byproducts of human action.

Avni Bansal orchestrates the coming together of shapes into indigenous mythical patterns in her ‘Phallic Series’. Celebrating the unison of male and female sexes in her bilaterally symmetric block printed compositions, Bansal depicts sexual interplay with splendour and adornment. Bansal seems to expand the repertoire of ancient tantric symbols in her monochromatic crimson red prints that tell a tale of biological transformation and spiritual transcendence. In these compact prints, one observes a grammar of shape fractals that hold the energy of life in an androgynous balance. As one looks at her other prints, the orientalist gaze begins to dissolve into a more rational one, reminding the imaging of the world in print by naturalists and botanists when these very mythical forms begin to appear as cellular and scientific. 

The relationship between the self and the world is further explored in the prints of Shivangi Ladha. Through an iterative process of printmaking, Ladha overlaps multiple states of being, within which a female body realises its existence within the world. Rigorously repeated sleepacts soon transport the viewer into a dreamlike space of the subconscious, evoked in the graded application of colour on or off the individually impressed bodies. Should her works ‘LightWeaver’ or ‘Rise I’ be mounted vertically, they shall begin to index the performative embodiment of her print practice itself. Ladha’s prints demonstrate the everyday rhythms through which one reconciles the inner self with the external reality. The viewer is invited to participate in the process of collective awakening in Ladha’s artworks - one that shall truly allow us to make the world one’s home.  

Jaimini Jariwala explores the question of home through the materiality of fabric that she has been surrounded with since her childhood. The historic port town of Surat, where Jariwala grew up emerged as a major textile industrial hub after independence. By using the cyanotype and stitch on paper, the artist at once brings the warps and wefts of the textile to dialogue with the oceao-mercantile ecology of her place. The figure of the home is held in tension between land and sea, recalling the life of sea-farers along the coast of Surat for whom much life is lived on the sail. The semi solid, skeletal, amphibian homes normalise transient living in a world that itself is on the move. 

The seven artists presented in this unique show have been brought together through the various programmes of the India Printmaker House, which is a platform dedicated to cultivating a vibrant art community united by a passion for printmaking. India Printmaker House (IPMH) believes in bridging cultures and expanding the global dialogue of art. The works presented by the IPMH at the LOPF 2025 have demonstrated a range of ways in which the question of place and belonging surfaces in the thinking and practice of the participating artists. Here, the medium of print begins to reveal the dualism of stabilization and destabilization, also reflective of the nature of lives that the artists who imagine homes within or outside borders constantly traverse, and effectually merge in their works of art. 

***

Notes on Play - 2

Connected to Earlier Post

Cult of Play: A new book looks at how children play in the city
published in Hindustan Times, 24 March 2025

Link: https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-news/cultures-of-play-a-new-book-looks-at-how-children-play-in-the-city-101742756856410.html

includes my essay:

Locating Play Across the Inside / Outside
Case of Mumbai apartments from 1970-2020
Anuj Daga

abstract:

This paper aims to trace the evolution in the cultures of play-spaces for children within the changing apartment living configurations of the middle class within the city of Mumbai over the last fifty years. The contention of the paper is to bring out the dialectic relationship between the forms of spaces and spaces of play that emerge in the densifying suburban residential neighbourhoods of Mumbai. In order to scope this study, I focus on three stages in typological forms of apartment configurations that have evolved in the city over 1970-2020, and the allied neighbourhood provisions to compensate for playspaces, that primarily come to characterise suburban living in Mumbai. These evolutions are reflective of the social, economic and political forces that shape urban development, and in effect the infrastructure of play as inscribed in the city.

A Plastic Parody

Full Essay Published here
https://serendipityarts.org/writing_initiatives/a-plastic-parody

A Plastic Parody

author: Anuj Daga

On a warm July evening in the Oworonshoki suburb of Lagos, residents from the nearby slum neighbourhood gather around a rather worn-out community hall in the corner of a large open ground beside a massive community water tank built during the previous election, that lay dry for the last five years. Two young men walk past the onlookers, urging them to pick up discarded plastic bottles collected from the neighbourhood streets in large polypropylene sacks, for what will emerge into a communal orchestra. The music beaten out through these empty bottles of purchased water along with other locally made instruments marked the opening of the Slumparty 2023 event. Originally started by Obiajulu Ozegbe or ‘Valu’ and his collaborators in 2019 as a way of mobilising the youth in the underprivileged areas of Lagos to alleviate the tension and violence within the community; Slumparty has morphed into an annual event that brings movement artists from across the world in their pursuit of redefining the perception of slums and overlooked sites in Lagos, through performance.

Slumparty became a serious affair soon after its first iteration when a performance of the local youth, who were otherwise turning to crime and divergent social activities due to inadequate access to infrastructure or issues of unemployment, compelled the local authorities to repair the street where they performed. Realising the potency of performance as a transformative tool, several performing artists, musicians, and visual artists gather annually thereafter to address socio-political and environmental issues through the festival, while training the youth in experimenting with contemporary forms of expression. In its edition for 2023, themed “Village of Dreamers”, artists from Tanzania, India, South Africa, New York, Cameroon, Ghana, and various parts of Nigeria were invited for a workshop to channelize latent insecurities into productive desires amongst the youth. This essay shall focus on one such performance conceptualised and executed during the event by the Ennovate Dance House the day after Slumparty’s inauguration.

Amongst the several collaborative and experimental acts lined up to take place on the street-turned-stage on the following day within the Oworo neighbourhood, the one that stood out was ‘Afro Communal Offering’ that addressed various social, political and environmental concerns. In this performance, a beastly creature completely clad in colourful plastic bottles creeps up from around a garbage bin, invading the street-stage with its jubilant dance. Soon taking over the space, the creature exerts a ferocious yet seductive appeal, swinging and jumping to engulf the audience in its being. Alarmed by its unusual advances, a few young men enter the scene, beating the masqueraded beast with wooden sticks. As its plastic skin begins to splinter, the creature slows down, finding its way out of the site/sight. Subsequently, a body covered in white emerges from the same garbage bin, and by demonstrating complex dis-entanglements, the body brings a certain calm to the otherwise volatile site.

Given the cultural context of Africa, the history of Lagos, and its contemporary challenges, ‘Afro Communal Offering’ is a particularly layered performance. In the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, masqueraded performances have long been a symbolic way to communicate a spirit’s message to the community through dance and other forms of expression. In a contemporary interpretation, the masquerade here is a costume constructed by stitching an abundance of empty and leftover plastic bottles into the colourful tentacles of the beastly body - simultaneously attractive and repulsive - much like the ghostly and inevitable presence of plastic in Nigeria’s everyday life today. The dance of the plastic beast on the street speaks to the spectacular presence of undesired waste suffocating the life of its people. Enveloping oneself thus, in plastic waste produced through the inevitable consumption of an everyday essential commodity like water, in itself makes a compelling political statement.

Water woes are historic for Nigeria. One recalls Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti - the principal innovator of Afrobeat - singing Omi o l'ota o in Yoruba, which is loosely translated in Pidgin English as ‘Water No Get Enemy’. Fela is not only calling out the corrupt postcolonial regime’s apathy towards the struggle for water as a resource , but also suggesting how its provision would assure success for anyone who attended to it within the system. Fela’s lament, from 1975, fifteen years after Nigeria’s independence, holds relevance until today. In several of Nigeria’s neighbourhoods, including Oworonshoki, accessing everyday drinking water is still a struggle, as it often has to be purchased from departmental stores or local suppliers for the lack of functional water-supply lines. Water is traded and exchanged in plastic gallons and bottles replacing the need for the traditional earthen calabash in Nigerian households. Valu, the choreographer of the performance elaborates: “Whether we buy or the government supplies, it is general practice now to use plastics to store water, it’s part of the reason why some parts of Lagos are very dirty as plastics have blocked the drainage system.”[1]

The beating up of this masqueraded beast by young men of the community therefore gestures towards the beating out of not only the damaging aspects of plastic from the environment and Nigerian everyday life but also the bane of bottled water. In another view, it is a demand for sustainable supply of potable water that will prevent the dependence on petty plastics. The white spirit emerging out of the garbage bin further references several local practices. The spirit is clouded in white powder which is rather significant for Nigerians. In Yoruba culture, when a person gives birth, the friends and family smear white powder on their face to celebrate and bring the new child into the world. Striking irregular poses, wrapped in a cloud thus, the other-worldly spirit speaks of both water and youth to lay tender ground for a healthy future. The appearance of the white spirit followed by the young men beating the plastic beast with a stick is also reminiscent of the Eyo festival celebrated by the Yoruba people. During this festival, the streets of Lagos are lined with performers clad entirely in white holding a palm stick, to ward off evil spirits and purify the city. In many ways, the act invites the youth to take up some purpose against these environmental evils that seem to be politically rooted.

Performed consciously and consistently on the dust-laden, yet-to-be-finished streets of one of the poorer neighbourhoods, Slumparty has brought significant change in the perception of Oworonshoki that was seen as a dark district in Lagos until 2019, into a place of celebration and political action. It is the condensation of multiple histories and futures through their embodiment in sound, space, materiality that (re)produces the everyday environment and social reality for public imagination. Dancing on the streets makes them safer, mobilising opportunities for the youth to express and assert their presence in the city. As new acts are performed, residents peep out of their rusted tin-roof houses, transforming the site into a theatre of possibilities. Professor of sociology and urbanism Abdoumaliq Simone, in his book For the City Yet to Come articulates: “Urban Africans have long made lives that have worked. There has been an astute capacity to use thickening fields of social relations, however disordered they may be, to make city life viable.”[2] In this vein, ‘Afro Communal Offering’ thus entangles the body and the city, reincarnating traditional tropes of African culture into the proliferating toxicity of plastic that not only becomes the material to produce music and masquerades but also eventually turns into a dark metaphor for the state of transforming ecosystems, unequal access, and asymmetrical modernity in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital.


Inputs by Ennovate Dance House
All images and videos by the author.



[1] Valu, founder of Ennovate Dance House in a conversation with the author.


[2] Simone, AbdouMaliq. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822386247

The Rhetoric of "World-class"

As airport roofs and bridges collapse, so do India’s claims of ‘world-class’ infrastructure

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/airport-roofs-bridges-collapse-india-claims-world-class-infrastructure-9442147/

Published on July 9, 2024, online in Indian Express

read HERE

Bus Stop Poles

 

Of fading, erasing, pasting, cramming, overwriting, repainting, decomposing, rusting, hiding, overlapping, fitting, squeezing, crunching, breaking, bending, showing and still standing.

These are poles through which waiting/halting spots for BEST buses are often marked on the streets in the city of Mumbai . They are like google pins in real geography. This morning I wondered how this almost bygone way of marking a bus stop, that are largely (must be) an artefact of smaller villages in India, still exists in a megacity like Mumbai. These red poles are plonked within once-tar finished roads, that stand like iron flags listing the number of bus/routes that pass along this road. Within these mass produced steel plates, the numbers have been once beautifully oil painted by "urban" calligraphers who would have to fit in the alpha-numeric bus numbers in at least two languages. Despite the fact that the newest bus stops have these instructional details printed and produced in newer techniques, BEST strangely preserves many of these poles with old-fashioned bus number plates that remain vulnerable to the externalities of tropical weather and urban roughness. 

Often, these beautiful number-plates are abused or graphically disregarded by the newer supervisors who do not see these these plates as a work of art. One can sense that how the urgency of dispensing updated information, and the unavailability of these oil paint calligraphers have led to the haphazard and careless pasting of shabbily handwritten stickers with bus numbers. In other instance, several numbers may have faded or erased to weather and time. Several such poles across the city, unlike the above two, stand crooked loosening their foothold into the every-dug road substrata. Many of their levels have gone haywire due to the concrete up-layering of roads. That such benign information boards could be of utmost important to the labour class that may be visiting these neighbourhoods or city for the first time is perhaps partly out of the purview of the BEST management. That these half-erased numbers could be misleading, misread or handicapping; and perhaps even lead the traveller to a wrong destination does not perhaps bother the regulators of this infrastructure.

However, one must give it to the urban dweller that he/she parses such fragility of the system with a measure of generosity. Such fractures of information produce a distinct sociality by forging communication within strangers waiting together for a common journey. Here, one reveals their destination to the other, with trust and hopes to find a way to reach safely. Here, options of movement are debated, and new alternatives for mobility are discussed. Here, serendipitous connections are made in the overlaps of routes and journeys, or disappointments about the missed buses are shared. Here, exasperations are co-performed and frustrations are vented through grins. And at times, it is here that battles are fought to secure a seat over a long journey.

The red shining bygone metal  bus stop flag stands stiff to this everyday roughness of the city, waiting to either dissolve or be engulfed into the smartness of the upgrading city.

On Art

"...Experiences that donot have words yet..."

All art perhaps tries to say something that conventional verbal or written language cannot capture, and vice versa. When something verbal can be expressed in art, it then becomes representation, or illustrative. This is the critique of representational art, perhaps. This, art that moves us is affecting us at a level slightly deeper than comprehensible. In the comprehension of that excess is where we push the boundaries of knowledge. The percentage of this excess may be very little, but to push that aspect is precisely the work of the artist. That is perhaps artistic practice, and what accounts to artistic "work". This work is not possible in the domain of representation, or total translation. For instance, if translation has to become art, then translation has to culturally push the limits of original text to become sustainable and critical for the present or future. This also doesn't mean that accurate representation of reality is not art. It doesn't mean that hyperrealism doesn't count as art. Here the context of time and space in which that art gets produced must be taken into account, for the disposition of that representative content on art may be quite different. To reinvent accuracy at different periods in history through the technology of its time, or in conversation with the technology of its time is then the content of art. This kind of churning allows perspectives to become referential and produce a search for relevance.

On writing

There is little that I have posted on my blog over some time. At least as compared to what I used to post over a decade ago. There was a lot of reflection on everyday life and I could see a lot of value in that. I was writing about my experiences of teaching, of talking to students, colleagues, rambles, discussions - basically recording the sociality of my everyday life, until one day when everything came back to eat me. I realised that the personal blog could become so political, and deeply affect so many people. And it is since then I moderated, censored heavily what this space could carry. Over the last few years, I have taken to old form of writing - in notebooks, diaries - for several reasons. The blog become too formal a space because it was indexed into many formal portals. Secondly, it gained the burden of being too correct and responsible. Thirdly, denser ideas did not find time and space to be elaborated and hence never got posted. Numerous half written posts exist on my draft-list and remain to be completed. Post covid -  a period of recuperation from the deep mental agony of the lockdown - has been a time of little enthusiasm. Could it be the effect of the vaccine that our brains work at half enthusiasm levels, or was it merely my own struggles to mend the complexities of my social life that held me back? I do not know. The diary notes have been ways of purging half cooked emotions into the notebook - something that this blog could hold before. At 37, can I afford to express myself as confused as before, as insecure as I was in my 20s? I think as we grow old, we produce new insecurities, new confusions. I have clarified a lot of my life-questions, however, I still remain clueless about what happens next, where to bend this journey in a meaningful way, and what risks could that have? Would there be a way of coming back, and should one even care?

I took a big step of finding myself a studio space soon after the lockdown was over. 'A room of one's own' - as Virginia Woolf would have phrased. Here, I come to be in the silence of my inner mind, be away from the gaze of my biological family, produce my own sociality, and experiment the rules of domesticity at my own terms. My studio is frugal and filled with curiosities of my own. A lot of times, this space allows me to think of the questions I theorised in the 2010 research fellowship on domesticity I submitted at Kamla Raheja Institute of Architecture. Here, I live the concepts of "dwelling" that Heidegger once wrote about, or imagine being Kafka's non-descript animal from 'The Burrow'.  What could this space become - a garden, a library, a bedroom, a studio, a laboratory, a museum, a hostel... Yet, it doesnot take away my loneliness completely.  I have realised that loneliness is a deeply personal thing. There could be a loneliness that is simply external which one feels in the absence of people. However, this loneliness that I experience is deeply internal, that doesnot quench on finding space or people. How could these two forms of loneliness be connected? It is in the answering of this, that perhaps dwelling becomes home. 

They say that reading is central to writing. And hence, I try to read. But reading is not merely textual. Reading is visual, aural, verbal, tactile and deeply sensorial. Sometimes I wonder how so much has already been said. Lately, I have found descriptions laborious. I have struggled not only to reproduce an event in text, but also to consume a representative text. Sometimes, these descriptions are extremely complex and at other times, they are very thin. How does one maintain just the right tension between these two extremes. It is here that I have felt my urge for poetry in text. Texts do not appeal to me unless they are poetic enough - that they have to work through all properties of a musical composition - of tempo, lyricality, rhythm and beats. Such production of text takes time. These texts have the possibility of offering way more in too less - like concentrates. They work with a measure of abstraction that can afford interpretive multiplicity. It is this quality that allows text to become deeper, and wider. How then, are classic writers able to produce so much writing? I think waiting is central to writing. Just like waiting is important for any other thing. Waiting makes one feel that they are immobile, unproductive, stationary, still. Such a feeling can make one so weak, and insecure. However, waiting could bring more assurance, clarity, poise and profoundness to one's work. Waiting fertilizes ruminations. It is in waiting that readings get ruminated to fertilize into cultural matter.

However, today, I felt that writing about my lack of writing could be an opportunity to lay out my own doubts. Perhaps that could allow me a platter to pick a direction, however weak it may appear, to lead into. The past months have been particularly disappointing for difficult weather - in all respects. Firstly the summers of Mumbai are not temperate enough for any creative work. Secondly, I kept away from travel in the hope of, and in preparation of an international travel to Lagos, Nigeria. Unfortunately, this didnot work out. This lost opportunity to travel for research to Lagos, Nigeria left a momentary, yet deep hole in my trajectory... something that could have allowed me a new vantage point to look at the world, and the self. For all the effort and resources that went in, it felt like losing the game after the hardest attempt. The feeling of futility and failure worsens in an already existing space and situation of loneliness. Opportunities come and go, although, how does one work through the intermediate period of waiting. How does one comprehend the failure of that one clear ray of hope that appeared amidst all other confusion? It is against this backdrop, that I feel the pain of not being able to accomplish the Lagos trip. Researchers put together papers for conference or publications through their exposures they strive, struggle and scavenge from various sources. The lost opportunity for travel is a lost opportunity for writing too. 

Encouragement is essential - for any activity we do. Encouragement is an assurance for continuing what we do, it is borrowed faith for the work of cultural practice. In the capitalistic world, encouragement also comes from the flow of consistent work. In other words, the continued demand for your thoughts is a form of assurance for you to keep working. It is a strange model of patronage. How does one assure such kind of demand for one's work? The extent of dissatisfaction increases when one has supposedly enhanced one's skill substantially but is not acknowledged or asked to lend that skill enough. There is an ecology through which cultural production takes place. Could the lack of encouragement hint at a rupture of this ecology? How does one balance criticality and encouragement for one's work. This would call for an engaged network of friends who are interested in your work, and what you do, how you do. It takes so much time to cultivate friends. The fear of investment of time into making friends was one of the key reasons I decided to move back to India. Moreso, I have stayed in the city because it is a familiar territory. The recent years have had me run into circumstances when these equations seemed to get recalibrated, even if in appearance. Can deep friendships simply disappear? Can old friends vanish quickly? 

Many such experiences have made me estranged, that have caused a profound ambiguity in my skill. I am hoping to reassure myself in the coming days to get back to writing more, doing more, in general being more positive and productive. This would call for a disciplining and grooving deeper into work, that doesn't seem like work? Let's see.