15 x 21 in
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Cartographies of Remembrance is a group exhibition that approaches the contemporary city as a palimpsest, as an evolving surface continuously reshaped by memory, lived experience, and material presence. Rejecting the notion of the metropolis as a finished product, the exhibition frames the city as a canvas scraped clean and rewritten over time, yet always retaining the ghosts of its previous inscriptions.
The works of Dakshayani Chippada, Katyayini Gargi, Dolla Shikder, Parth Itwala, Bhimanshu Pandel, and Srinia Chowdhury approach memory as something inseparable from the spaces we inhabit and leave behind. Whether through the emotional residue of rented homes, the disappearance of a grandmother's house, the layered histories carried by the body, or the ecological knowledge embedded within landscapes, these artists reveal the place as a living archive rather than a static backdrop. Their practices move across domestic interiors, vernacular environments, and imagined terrains, tracing how cities and settlements are shaped by migration, inheritance, gender, and collective histories. Together, their works suggest that memory is continuously reconstructed through encounters with architecture, material culture, and the changing geographies of belonging.
Taking into account how urban spaces are inhabited not merely physically, but emotionally and psychologically, the exhibition will translate the overwhelming vastness of the city into intimate, personal narratives, processing the urban experience through a private, reflective lens. Moving seamlessly between the individual and the collective, the exhibition positions the city as a repository of lived experiences, where childhood memories, domestic spaces, and everyday encounters become potent sites of reflection.
A city is experienced in different realms and layers, beginning with the tangible and the empirical report, where each visual visage gives us the idea of the city and its elements as they exist in form and shape. The terrain is shaped by the collectives and public discourse, and conversely the cities and its surroundings shape the identity and personhood of its inhabitants.
Deepanwita Das, Sejal Solanki, Ayantika Sajwal, Surendra Dewasi, Sanyukta Kudtarkar, Ritwika Ganguly, and Srinia Chowdhury explore the city through its quieter, more intimate registers, where personal recollection, sensory experience, and everyday encounters become forms of remembering. From botanical remnants embedded in colonial architecture and the lived textures of neighbourhoods to the tactile memory of clay, the emotional resonance of solitary figures, digitally mediated family archives, and sound transformed into imagined landscapes, their practices foreground the subtle ways in which urban life is absorbed and internalised. Rather than documenting the city directly, these artists reveal how memory accumulates through touch, movement, observation, and repetition, proposing the city as an evolving psychological landscape where the personal and the collective continually intersect.
In Cartographies of Remembrance, each artist’s practice invites us to consider the city not as a fixed geography but as a living archive of layered experiences, where histories, emotions, and material traces continually converge. In attending to the overlooked, the ephemeral, and the deeply personal, the artists expand our understanding of urban space beyond its physical form, revealing the city as something that is constantly remembered, imagined, and remade through lived experience. Their works suggest that it is within these quiet acts of observation and recollection that the many lives of the city continue to unfold.