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Mycelial Legacies brings together paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, and videos by 30 artists with past and present affiliations to the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara – an institution that has been one of the wellsprings of contemporary Indian art practice. In doing so, the exhibition seeks to codify the contribution of women artists to the development of the Faculty and to the shaping of its broader influences, and to widen an institutional legacy that has traditionally been signposted in terms of the contributions of its male stalwarts. 

Niroj’s visual practice is informed by a methodical understanding of dealing with waste materials and discarded objects that inhabit overflowing junkyards and innocuous dumps all around us. At these landfills or dhalav, he becomes the vivisector, peeling away the rugged, superficial layers of everyday usage and incises into the very heart of what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called ‘the equipmental being of equipment.’ This is what makes his enquiry magical, for landfills, according to Niroj, are altars of rebirth where objects find a life renewed, where new meanings are associated with everyday items, where the value of an equipment far exceeds what it may have been used for before.

The concept of the body has always piqued Aditya Puthur’s interest, and he has transformed it into his muse. He questions the body's existence as mere flesh and blood—to him, it is a story of decay, disease, and death. Or maybe a manifestation of our consciousness. Oil became his medium of choice because of its visceral quality and his desire to create photorealistic imagery. Serving as the antithesis to the dull two-dimensional clinical drawings that we study in science textbooks and which blind us to our physicality, Aditya’s works are palpably sensuous.