Fifteen years ago, when Rasika Kajaria founded Exhibit 320 in Delhi’s Lado Sarai, she envisioned more than a white-walled gallery. The space was built for experimentation, where contemporary artists could push boundaries without fear. Now, with Shared Worlds, an anniversary exhibition, the gallery revisits that founding vision while firmly casting its gaze toward the future. Curated by Deeksha Nath, the exhibition brings together 34 artists. Shared Worlds offers a “trans-historical and trans-material” terrain where painting, sculpture, print, textile, installation, and photography collide and converse. “The exhibition becomes a space not of isolated masterpieces,” says Nath, “but of entangled dialogues between past and present, form and content, self and world.”
The show unfolds along three thematic threads—abstraction as a materially and culturally resonant language; identity and gender as evolving performances; and memory as both archive and prophecy. From climate crisis to migration, inheritance to erasure, the works speak in distinct and layered voices.
There is Gunjan Kumar, who engages with pigments both organic and mineral, Indian muslin, and handwoven cotton. In the Sifr series, thousands of tiny, handmade cones emerge from gestures that mimic a dervish whirl. “Process in the works is the message,” she insists.
Nandan Ghiya’s “sculptural photographs” layer images of Rajasthani heritage sites with found portraits. He revisits the Varaha avatar as a metaphor for environmental degradation, juxtaposing royal grandeur with street-level detail. “One sculpture reflects on royal heritage, the other borrows from the streets,” he says.
Deena Pindoria’s textile works are shaped by gendered craft traditions and intergenerational memory. For seven years, she’s collaborated with Ajrakh block printers and natural dyers. One work tells the story of a young girl from the Rajput Sodha community, whose grandmother migrated from Sindh to Kutch. “It is not simply about collaboration,” Pindoria says. “But about opening and sharing one’s innermost world.”
This spirit of crossing boundaries and building bridges is the soul of Shared Worlds. “We wanted to champion artists who challenge conventions, whether through material, message, or medium,” Kajaria reflects. She is candid about the uneven terrain, especially for traditional and indigenous practices, which often gain more traction internationally than at home. “Without support, age-old traditions risk disappearing,” she warns.
Nath calls the show “a lived space of encounter,” where the act of viewing becomes a kind of participation. The works extend an invitation. To look, listen, unlearn, and reimagine.
As the gallery readies itself for its next chapter with a new architect-designed extension, expanded programming, and digital initiatives, Shared Worlds suggests that contemporary art need not choose between the intimate and the infrastructural, the local and the global, the experimental and the enduring.
When & Where:
Shared Worlds; Till September 20;
Exhibit 320, Delhi