As we navigate the world relying on our eyes and enjoy art, too, through the beauty of colours, lights, human expressions we take in from films, paintings, and performances of all kinds – it’s easy to forget that the other five senses are there too. Always alert, picking up on scents, sounds, textures and tastes that round out our experience of everything but are hardly ever the complete focus of our attention. Pravaha 2026, a multi-sensory festival currently underway at Bangalore International Centre, Domlur, and continuing till March 1, seeks to awaken them all. “We’re offering 15 events, each of them different in their own right and each having a sensorial element that they tap into,” explains Sandhya Kannan, the festival’s curator.
Two exhibits are on show throughout the duration of the festival. One ‘Histories of Indian Perfume’ introduces visitors to Indian perfumery through the ages with texts, paintings, records, and objects, while another, ‘First-Hand’ invites one to navigate a story while blindfolded, “In the first, curated in collaboration with the Marg Foundation, viewers will not just get to learn how perfumes evolved in India but they’ll also get to smell some wonderful things. The second, by artist Nitish Jain is an experience with just 10 people in each session. They run through a story that plays on headphones and through the progression of the story, they are listening, tasting, smelling, and touching things, even drawing sometimes. It essentially taps into how you experience your world even without seeing, simply because of how much sensorial knowledge you already possess. In a climate where you are constantly mediating your experience with the world through the phone or laptop, it is 90 minutes where you’re completely devoid of technological interference, which I find refreshing,” comments Kannan.
While the first half of the festival included musical performances that combined sounds with scents exploring how memory is deeply tied with the two, sensorial explorations of coffee and more, the weekend has much to offer. ‘Future Food Taste Test’ by Edible Archives, a collective that studies and creates work on the intersection of food, climate and culture, is one, with attendees getting to taste and pay attention to the flavours and textures of ingredients showing up as ecosystems shift. Another, is ‘Kadahin Milandaasin’, a performance by musician Tarun Malani, which will be weaving together family archives, oral histories, and live improvisation. Kannan adds, “Tarun’s album is essentially a love letter to Sindh and the influence that his grandfather had on him. What we’re urging audiences to do is not just to listen to his memories and historical background, but to bring their own memories of childhood and their relationship with their grandparents to it. These are some of the ways in which we are taking traditional performances that already exist, but seeing how we can bring a new lens to it. Thereby expanding how people perceive existing works.”