This show celebrates spaces of creativity and kinship among artists

A recent exhibition highlighted a sense of solidarity and kinship among multidisciplinary art practitioners. Displays that seemed disparate when seen separately—broken ceramic pieces, a simple sign made from terracotta sending a message of unity, depiction of empty public spaces that otherwise don’t get our attention—and an animated movie on the animal motifs from the pottery of the Indus Valley civilisation—came together in a cohesive whole in the show, All Together Now. On view at the India International Centre until last week, the exhibition stood out for its documentation of artists’ friendships and the integral role that the city of Delhi has played in their work.

It is for the network of alliances that the exhibition has created that its relevance ensues in spite of the show having gotten over. 19 artists such as Uzma Mohsin, Ishan Tankha, Shoili Kanungo, Srinivas Kuruganti, Kaushik Ramaswamy and Sarnath Banerjee, continue to respond to landmarks such as the Jantar Mantar, which has been a site for protest for decades, objects and spaces that bear witness to violence, and more. In the show, the artists presented a variety of different works and media in their diverse practices—from journalistic reportage and analogue experiments in a darkroom to investigating archival material, pedagogic presentations of form, and re-looking at image practices within the lens of contemporary art. Today, the works can be viewed on the social media handles, websites of the various artists.

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Artist Sukanya Ghosh, who also wrote the proposal for the show, was thinking about the world in general and how everything was imploding. “There’s so much violence and hate we encounter daily,” she says. “I was thinking about how this seeps into our work as creative practitioners and what keeps us going. These pockets of friendship, conversations are some of those things. The show began from there.”

A common thread

Besides being united in feeling, the artists are tied together by a common thread: of sharing a studio and darkroom in Delhi, courtesy of artist Aditya Pande. “The studio located in Delhi’s Shahpur Jat has become the locus of our friendships and communities... The central theme here is how communities of friendship and care need to be celebrated. These spaces help us process what’s going on around us. It’s a self-curated show but if you look closely, you see echoes of one work in another,” adds Ghosh.

The show also saw the release of a box set of photo zines (around 400 editions) by Tankha, a Delhi-based photographer. Titled Still, Life, the set—available for sale even now—explores the theme of conflict and its impact on daily lives through a photojournalistic lens.

Some of the works on display at All Together Now are series-in-progress and date back to 2018, like Kaushik Ramaswamy’s Nokshi Kantha (colour photographs, 2018), which features kantha artists from Katna, his mother’s ancestral village in Murshidabad, West Bengal. “Kantha as an artform survives among people who have very strong daily lives. They cook, clean, and raise children. They usually start their day early. During a conversation (with the artists), they told me that ‘we generally don’t get to wear what we make’... These are expensive saris. It was from this simple desire that the photographs emerged,” says Ramaswamy. The photographs not only show the intricate geometric motifs that the kantha artists excel at but the unadulterated joy on the faces of these women who practise an intricate type of embroidery craft—offering them a moment away from their packed labour-intensive daily lives.

Loss, renewal and freedom

All Together Now is easy on the eyes, and uses commonly understood and accessible media such as phone photography, animated videos, and interactive art. “Most people are not used to seeing unconventional work. In that sense, the response has been phenomenal. People are spending time and asking questions, which is nice,” adds Ghosh.

Filmmaker Pallavi Arora and ceramic artist Shirley Bhatnagar, for instance, explore the idea of loss and recreation through a conversation between clay and animation. They combine Kintsugi, the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold, and misplaced pottery of the Indus Valley Civilisation in an animated film, Sindhu—A Subterranean Song (video and polychrome terracotta painted pot, 2020). It was commissioned by Serendipity Arts Festival in 2020 and screened at the Nila International Folklore festival of India in 2021 and the Clay Gimhae Museum, Busan Korea in an exhibition of Indian contemporary ceramics in 2023.

A timely and urgent piece of work comes from Mohsin. In Songkeepers (black-and-white hand-printed photographs), the artist delves into the predicament of “protest” using Right to Information Act (RTI) applications submitted by citizens to the Parliament Street police station, seeking permission to hold protests at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar square. “While sifting through five years’ worth of documents and affidavits (2014-2019), and recording the sounds and faces of Jantar Mantar square, I not only discovered recurring themes of distress in a mélange of pleas and petitions but also traces of a resolute citizen who staunchly believes in upholding and envisioning freedom,” writes Mohsin in her brief. The result is a series of silver gelatin montages—the portraits of the people who filed their applications superimposed on them. This is an ongoing series. It’s accompanied by a piece of interactive art — Like Talking to A Wall (black-and-white photograph with interactive stamps). The photo shows the word azadi muraled on a wall and urges viewers to use a physical stamp to leave a ‘like’.

Unsurprisingly, the photo is filled with hundreds of likes.

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