Appearing

Conceived as a landscape of spatial imagination, Appearing maps the tangible and intangible dimensions of space, how we enter it, hold it, are shaped by it, and sometimes struggle against it. This exhibition traces how bodies navigate architectures of control, moving through space, performing gendered motions while simultaneously resisting them, asserting their own momentum against systems that demand compliance. Bringing together works by Arieno Kera, Katayoun Karami, Monali Meher, Niloofar Rahnama, Ritika Sharma, and Sejal Parekh, whose practices are an enquiry into terrains that are claimed, denied, and constantly negotiated. Working across video, performance, mark-making, and painting, their works position space as a site of negotiation, memory, and intimate redefinition.

For Ritika Sharma and Monali Meher, the spaces within and around them become both subjects of inquiry and fields of control. Meher’s performance moves through precarious terrains scattered with sharp glass objects, echoing the fragility and constant recalibration of diasporic experience. Meanwhile, Sharma’s paintings depict shadowed figures navigating uncertain landscapes. Rendered tense and alert, her subjects embody the unease of moving through environments shaped by surveillance and opacity. In Niloofar Rahnama’s and Sejal Parekh’s works, domestic interiors become spaces coded by feminine labour articulate presence through gestures of care, repetition, and quiet endurance. In System of Magical Defence, Parekh uses rotational rhythm as metaphor, transforming domestic labour into a cyclical choreography of resistance against structures that seem endlessly in motion. Whereas Rahnama’s intimate paintings reclaim the feminine interior as both physical and mental, illuminating what is often unseen and offering presence where absence has long been expected.

Looking toward the past as a way to understand the self, Katayoun Karami and Arieno Kera examine how memory, held through erasure, rupture, or lineage, shapes spatial belonging. In her work Self Portraits, Karami turns to half-erased images and torn fragments, questioning what remains when we attempt to preserve ourselves and how absence itself can become a powerful, chosen form of existence. Through mark-making drawings such as Notes on Marking a Wood, Kera reinterprets Naga roots from a decolonized perspective, challenging exoticized narratives and insisting on the visibility of tribal presence within histories that have repeatedly attempted to silence it.

While Appearing foregrounds the personal stories and embodied experiences of the contributing artists, it ultimately opens a wider inquiry into how we perceive and inhabit space as material, emotional, or imagined. Together, the works form a shared terrain for witnessing defiance and survival, offering new ways to disrupt, modify, and reconfigure the politics of the spaces we occupy.

-Yash Vikram