Painting
Beast-Particle-Wing
Asif Sharief Shaikh’s paintings refuse spiritual comfort. Beneath vivid surfaces, forms condense, fracture, and reassemble — a restless intelligence invested in transformation, not style.
✦ Editor’s Note
Speculative forms &
the urban condition
A journal at the intersection of contemporary art, cultural criticism, and the unsentimental gaze — where quietude becomes method and pressure reveals form.
✦ Featured Essay
Leela: Amit Ambalal’s Fauna-Speech
In a speculative turn, Ambalal reframes animal behaviour not as metaphor but as a survival code within the urban order. ‘Leela’ becomes a visual lexicon where instinct and architecture converge, questioning who truly adapts to whom.
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City & Culture
Bhopal Has Its Own Pace
What began as a stay at Taj Lakefront unfolded into a deeper encounter with a city where conversation, civility, and quiet rhythm resist the logic of acceleration.
Exhibition Review
Ontologies of Quietude
‘Echoes of Silence’ at Jehangir Art Gallery probes whether silence today is resistance, survival, or suppression — a contested terrain when volume is mistaken for value.
Artist Profile
Power, Off-Centred: Neha Lavingia
Neha Lavingia’s work does not warn or plead. It observes, relentlessly, dismantling the human illusion of control through quiet, vigilant attention.
Drawing as Method
Crowd Logic: How Presence Becomes Collective
Hema Mhatre constructs figures as relational conditions where identity dissolves into collective pressure — drawing as a mode of thinking beyond depiction.
Material & Precarity
Figuring Pressure: Mind, Material, and Precarity
Twinkle’s practice examines pressure as lived condition. With unsentimental precision, material and image register strain rather than resolve it.
⟡ From Ikattha-5 & beyond
Terracotta & Labour
Bodies At Work
Kuldip Karegaonkar’s terracotta records how agrarian labour, time, and endurance inscribe themselves quietly onto human bodies.
Geometry & Restraint
Enduring Spaces
Mallikarjun Katke builds forms that withstand attention — geometry under pressure where systemic structure and memory hold ground.
Inner Work
Inner Work: Beyond Self-Help
Shabari Smitha Guha Nath’s work turns introspective, framing mood without aestheticising suffering or glorifying spirituality.
Culture & Containment
Culture, Grid-Locked
Urgain Zawa’s work holds culture carefully, framed precisely, yet quietly denied the right to breathe — intact but disconnected.
After Damage
The Shape of What Remains
Jaydhar Boro asks how care might be re-learned within landscapes already transformed — focusing on endurance beyond survival.
Urban Ecologies
Soft bodies, Hard Cities
Deepakk’s work views urban progress from the displaced body of the animal — a city built on repair and accelerated forgetting.
✦ Review
Mood as Method: Post-Speed Art
Against the velocity of contemporary life, ‘Thodasa Rumani Ho Jaye’ makes a quiet but radical case for slowness, mood, and emotional truth. A meditation on how art can reclaim time as texture rather than metric.
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