Booth C04
For IAF 2026, our booth stages a contrast of appearance: the fragile interiority of a domestic household is juxtaposed against the sublime expanses of nature, a surreal forest forestalling the edge of urbanity. As you inch closer to each artwork, this contradiction — our spatial horizon — unexpectedly collapses; for quotidian objects (re)claim a solidity in bronze, a spectral afterlife, whereas otherworldly armatures betray a human imprint, irrevocably marking its fracture. Ordinary household supplies are compressed into abstracted residues, which accumulate into a futurist, hypnotic symphony of colour. A painterly forest with its pulsating stillness compels a rather intimate encounter while the dusty corner of a kitchen negates its dimensional coordinates, appearing at an uncanny distance, assimilating into deep time. As our spatial parameters shift, this curation warps into a series of entanglements — the sacred and the profane, the self and the other, the human and non-human, a severed body and the canon of history.
A chromatic density permeates the surface of Sandeep Mukherjee and Soumya Netrabile’s canvases, but each tap into a distinct impulse; Mukherjee distils mundane objects to refract a dazzling, layered palette of pigments, whereas Netrabile grapples with the affective hues of colour, conjuring metaphysical and elliptical landscapes that somehow appear deeply visceral and immediate. Her works build on sensorial experiences accumulated from exploring natural habitats — forests, rivers, mountains, and gardens. But Netrabile doesn’t romanticise this nature in an escapist discourse, rather, her work becomes an active space that reckons with movement, contradictions, and relentless change.
Mahesh Baliga turns to still life painting with a subtle brilliance, as he focuses on the overlooked fragments of the ordinary — leftover decorations, hidden fruit, lemons, a cloaked papaya — and infuses each detail with an uncanny emotional resonance, thinking through the puzzles of being itself. Trupti Patel’s new body of sculptures — will and rise — embody an unfolding of each other; cast in iron, will bears witness to the spirit of tenacity — the bare mettle of courage that stakes its presence against blood-tinted earth. But in its very collapse, one encounters rise: a resurgence forged through immense pressure, a fiery dawn that sheds its former ashes. Each gesture, pigment, and element of these sculptures is precise, as Trupti Patel explores the complexity of human emotion and the textures of nature.
Prajakta Potnis and Amol K Patil exhume the political fabric of oppression woven into the interiority of domestic spaces. Potnis’ still life series of paintings examines the domestic space as a site of care, labour, and structural inequality. One encounters spatial politics of the kitchen, which reconfigures the genre of ‘still life’ through a feminist critique: objects are no longer neutral or functional, but are recast as material witnesses to repetitive labour and unequal power relations. Potnis draws our gaze into the vulnerability intrinsic to belonging itself, looking at histories of erasure, as trauma manifests as mould, roots, dust, or a festering wound inside the kitchen. This precarious, tenuous existence of those on the margins becomes the protagonist of Amol K Patil’s sculpture, as the artist reimagines the chaotic fabric of chawls in Mumbai. Cast in bronze, Patil’s sculpture speaks to the collective, giving each seemingly banal object — and human gesture — a solidity and weight, in turn, “urging us to recognise the same importance and strength in one another.” Patil materialises an intimate encounter: two fatigued bodies fold into one another, but stand tall in fierce resilience.
— Sonali Bhagchandani
