Like a river shaped by countless drops, each carrying its own weight, memory and course, The River of Many Drops at Srishti Art Gallery gathers six distinct practices into a single, flowing terrain. The exhibition showcases landscape not as a distant view, but as a way of understanding, experiencing, and mapping lived reality. Across etching, painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, wood, and collaborative gestures, landscape unfolds through bodies, memory, material, architecture, and collective experience. Each practice offers its own terrain, yet together they converge into a landscape held in common, one continually shaped through individual perspectives and lived histories.
Speaking about the exhibition, curator Aishwarya Suresh shares, “The River of Many Drops embraces landscape as a collective consciousness formed through many individual perspectives, moving between the microcosm of the drop and the vastness of the river. Landscape is not a terrain we merely occupy, but an entity we continually create through our bodies, memories, relationships and imagination. The exhibition understands mapping not as the act of defining boundaries, but as an evolving process of relation. ”
My work Elevations in Depth enters the landscape through the relationship between what rises and what supports it. I work with circular forms that move between elevation and depth, creating a rhythm of expansion and contraction where the centre and the edges remain connected. My understanding of elevation moves away from hierarchy. I see height and depth as interdependent conditions rather than opposites. Through layered material, I build a landscape that appears to move both inward and outward, allowing order and disorder to coexist, much like the shifting conditions of nature. The repeated circular forms create a sense of continuity, while the changes within the surface hold movement, difference and instability. Depth, for me, is not something beneath elevation, but a condition through which elevation itself can exist. Through this relationship, I explore landscape not as a fixed space, but as a system of relationships where highs and lows, movement and stillness, and difference and unity continually shape one another.
— Kumaresan Selvaraj
My works enter the landscape through the body, moving between states of rest, memory, thought and making. In North, I draw from my experience of sleep after childbirth, using it as a terrain of fragmentation and wholeness. The body exists simultaneously within the attempt to rest, the movement of thoughts and the awareness of being awake. The different stages of sleep become shifting landscapes within the body, each carrying its own rhythm and movement. In Pillows, I move through memory, looking at softness, permanence and the ability of an object to leave marks. Pillows become witnesses to what has rested upon them, holding traces and memories that move from one chapter to another, between the individual and the world outside. In Cocoon and Untitled, I bring together discarded materials, threads and gestures to form another kind of landscape — one through which relationships, consumption, time and collective histories are held. Across these works, I remain interested in the body and its surroundings as something continually in the process of becoming.
— Ratna Gupta
I approach the human figure as a landscape, one that carries within it the social, political and material conditions of its time. In The Doors and Descendants of the Delights and Dismay, the door becomes both a physical object and an archival motif for me, carrying histories of labour, use, damage and time. It is a threshold between spaces, but also between intimacy and restriction, where I negotiate access, class and belonging through the body. The carved figures I make inhabit this material landscape quietly, their gestures holding a tension between care and vulnerability, between the need for connection and the conditions that make it fragile. I let the marks, cracks, holes and ruptures remain visible, allowing damage to become part of the history of the material rather than something I erase. For me, the landscape of the body and the landscape of the object begin to mirror one another, holding histories of use, survival and passage.
— Dibin Thilakan