Yellows,Green,Brown & Blues . Sudharsan Mahalakshmi, @sudharsanphotographs, posted July 15, 2026, shot on iPhone, digitial photography, in Tamil Nadu, India

Sudharsanphotographs is based in Tamil Nadu

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Autosaurus Tripous, Jitish Kallat, 2007, Resin, paint, steel, brass, 101.9 x 53.14 x 66.14 in, 259 x 135 x 168 cm

Kallat was born in and studied in Mumbai, India. He currently works from there too.

Inherited Gardens, Astha Sharma, June-July 2026, digital art

Sharma lives and works in New Delhi, India.

• Keerthana Kunnath: Gender, Diaspora, and Visual Agency (Looking Forward and Carolina Lio, March 25, 2026)

• Keerthana Kunnath: Documenting female bodybuilders in South India (WePresent by WeTransfer, September 25, 2024, Ritupriya Basu)

  • Soon, she became interested in Kalari—an Indian martial art that originated in Kerala during the 11th century CE. As her research deepened, she stumbled upon a 30-year-old female bodybuilder, Arathy Krishna, and soon found a group of female bodybuilders dotted across the state. She set out to capture their powerful balance of femininity and strength, building her ongoing documentary series, “Not What You Saw.”

  • “Kunnath set out on a road trip to meet each of the bodybuilders where they lived, taking them “out of their gym or workout spaces to a more recognizable Indian backdrop, dressed in traditional outfits, not only to make it relatable to women back in India, but also to juxtapose their powerful physiques with a familiar space and look.” Kunnath photographed the women against serene beaches; resting on a patch of grass in front of a lake; posing against a quintessential Keralan home with a terracotta-tiled roof.”

Read more about Kunnath on kuchhai.art

“The campaign honours four competitive athletes with varying personal trajectories of autonomy and life-stage transitions.
Kavitha, a 40-year-old mother who entered the sport in her late 30s; Chitra, an experienced physical education teacher and former national-level rugby player; Jannath, a personal trainer who stepped into the competitive arena at age 20; and Bisha, a physique competitor whose breakthrough success in Malappuram redefined her personal conviction. Together, they represent a real, grounded cross-section of modern fortitude.” (Tilfi)

“‘Becoming’ unfolds through two complementary aesthetics: restrained and bold, each activating the body differently. The minimalist silks dissolve against the skin, their sole ornament a corner dancing paisley, creating silence that amplifies the wearer’s own presence, just like the wandering panthers in the Shikargahs. What emerges is a dialogue on heritage craftsmanship and a sculpted, moving body. The textile cedes nothing to passive display; instead, it positions heritage craft and ancestral motifs as extensions of agency itself.” (Tilfi)

“Through this encounter, ‘Becoming’ stands as an expansion of modern Indian identity. The subjects are positioned not as passive muses being dressed, but as active, self-determined women who occupy heritage architecture, competitive titles, and luxury textiles entirely on their own terms.” (Tilfi)

Becoming, June 2026, Keerthana Kunnath, photography

‘Becoming’ is an artistic exploration of form, fortitude, and the handwoven saree. Emerging from photographer Keerthana Kunnath’s sustained work with women bodybuilders in Kerala, the project is set against the sun-dappled corridors and deep red-oxide floors of traditional Kerala architecture.

Through this encounter, ‘Becoming’ stands as an expansion of modern Indian identity. The subjects are positioned not as passive muses being dressed, but as active, self-determined women who occupy heritage architecture, competitive titles, and luxury textiles entirely on their own terms.

Kunnath is was born in Beypore, Calicut and splits her time between London and India.

View the entire Kuch Hai gallery

Portraits: Coming out August 29, 2026

I am in the process of creating the next one — Portraits: Front-facing or direct gaze as shown by South Asian artists. Here are some WIP images to give you a better idea of what the theme means:

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Past Catalogues: The Nursery

In April, I released the first curated catalogue ever, The Nursery: Art for children’s spaces.

View The Nursery

• Rukshaan Art - Chalapaka Chakravarthy Overview (Rukshaan Art)

  • “Chalapaka Chakravarthy captures the rhythms of rural life through drawings, woodcuts, etchings, and glass engravings depicting farmers, vendors, and everyday toil from sunrise to sunset.”

  • “The works extend beyond rural documentation, portraying human resilience and a quiet strength that sustains ordinary lives - whether in markets, streets, or open fields.”…Read more →

Follow the rabbit hole on KuchHai.art

Voices of the Street - 1, Chalapaka Chakravarthy, glass engraving, 18 x 18 inches (46 x 46 cms)

Chakravarthy was born in Srikakulum, Andhra Pradesh and studied in Visakhapatnam. He later studied and now works in Vadodara, Gujarat.

Read the full Rabbit Hole on KuchHai.art

Republic Day, Tikri Border, Delhi-Haryana, Aban Raza, 2021, Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in / 121.9 x 152.4 cm

Tikri Border, Delhi-Haryana, 2021, Aban Raza, Oil on canvas, 48 × 72 in / 121.9 x 182.8 cm

Raza was born in New Delhi, and studied in Delhi’s College of Art. She lives and works in Noida. She currently travels all over India to document labor and gender rights protests happening across the country.

• Rukshaan Art presents Navivasi (New Fragrance): A Solo Show by Ajay Dhapa (Platform Mag, November 11, 2025)

  • “Navivasi is the locality where he grew up amidst trust and shared lives. Using floral carpet motifs as metaphors for land and relationships, he paints layered narratives filled with humour and sensitivity.”

  • “He sees and paints the invisible thread that sustains life: trust given, and trust received.”

  • “This work articulates the architecture of care: the invisible systems of protection and perseverance that shape one’s becoming. The work becomes a study in duality: protection and perseverance, stillness and propulsion, tenderness and toil.”

  • “In Ajay Dhapa’s visual language, the horse becomes a symbol of endurance and routine, echoing the cycles of domestic life. It is the tireless presence within their stories—the provider, the partner, the weight and rhythm of the everyday.”

• Ajay Dhapa overview (Rukshaan Art)

  • “Drawing from personal experience, Ajay Dhapa’s works engage elegantly and lightly with expressing the socio-political milieu of his hometown. Brought up in a multi-religious locality where different communities live in perfect harmony and interdependence…”

  • With the help of miniaturist imagery, he enhances various childhood memories to create an involvement of events, space and time in his works.

  • Treating the floral carpet design as a metaphor for our land and symbol of beautiful relationships, he superimposes various stills of situations which he recalls and recreates.

  • His canvases are populated with characters referenced from Mughal and Pahadi miniatures to create interesting stories or situations on a large surface.

• this.gallery.hyd

Navivasi (New fragrance) - 106, Ajay Dhapa, Mixed media on canvas, 48 x 72 inches (123 x 183 cms)

Dhapa was born in Jamnagar, Gujarat, India. He lives and works primarily in Vadodara (Baroda), Gujarat. He studied in Ahmedabad and Vadodara.

• “Small business holders are seen as the protagonists in Gulab Kapadiya’s paintings. In a corner of the city where the sun pours like molten amber and morning stirs in the poetry of hands at work, a man bends and folds stubborn bamboo into baskets that will carry the weight of the day; a barber’s blade cuts through hair and air; a vegetable seller arranges his greens with care, laying out the sustenance that nourishes the neighbourhood. These gestures are intimate chronicles of daily life and survival, transformed through layered watercolour on rice paper, further extended onto canvas.” (9 new art shows in India we’re excited about this March, Vogue India, Sana Krishna, March 6, 2026)

• “With brushstrokes on rice paper, he transforms everyday figures like vegetable sellers and labourers into icons. His painting of a man in a banana plantation celebrates the deep connection between humanity and the earth…The repetition of simple forms, such as jute bags and bamboo baskets, creates a meditative atmosphere.” (Nature of Nostalgic Delights, Platform Mag, Rukshaan Art, January 1, 2026)

• '“Gulab uses soft water colour washes and layers them to create a vintage effect in an attempt to render such lives as beautiful and meaningful. His work is also preoccupid with the notion of these works having their own history and a specific place and function in the world.” (The Curators Art, January 28, 2024)

Untitled, Gulab Kapadiya, Watercolour on rice paper on canvas, 36 x 96 inches (91 x 244 cms)

Kapadiya was born in Amreli, Gujarat, and lives and works in Baroda, Gujarat.

• DBPFP 2024: Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad (The Photographer’s Gallery)

  • Through fusing photography and Warli painting, photographer Gauri Gill (b. 1970, India) and painter Rajesh Vangad (b. 1975, India) collaboratively reinvent the practice of painted photography, interweaving historical and generational painting practices into the photographic object.

  • The project began in 2013 in the Adivasi village of Ganjad, Dahanu. Vangad, who grew up in this landscape, served as Gill’s knowledgeable guide.

  • While Gill’s photographs captured the ever-changing qualities of the land, they fell short of revealing the hidden but essential elements beyond the visible. Vangad bridged this gap by embellishing Gill's images with intricate drawings. His vivid narratives depict the multifaceted realities of Warli life in the region, from floods and droughts to family and village life, unrest and terror, spirits and myths, light and shadow.

• Another Way of Seeing (Granta, Michael Collins, March 7, 2015)

  • Only a two-hour drive from Mumbai but a world away from the metropolis, Ganjad is a small farming village nestled in the hills of northern Maharashtra’s coastal region.

  • The population are Warli, an indigenous, or Adivasi, people, who speak an unwritten language and are known for their folk paintings. Traditionally these were painted by women, using a paste made from flour and applied to dung walls inside their homes. Symbolic illustrations in stark white on an ochre background, they would commemorate special occasions such as weddings and harvests.

  • When I later saw my contact sheets, I realized that so much of the narrative that I had received from Rajesh – the great stories, which had made it come alive for me – was missing. Part of it, I realized, was the limitation – and perhaps, unique presence – of photography, which restricts what is in the image to ‘now’. - Gauri Gill

• Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad: Fields of Sight (Trans Asia Photography, Inderpal Grewal, Volume 5, Issue 2, Spring 2015)

  • Collaborative, creative, and experimental, Gill and Vangad, in Fields of Sight, provide a new language for art practices that address the politics and aesthetics of environmental destruction.

  • There is no demarcation between land and sky, all are filled with his stories, nothing is left to profit and production; the only utility possible is that of his stories.

  • Gill’s photographs become both a setting and a match for Vangad’s intensities.

  • Refusing to paint over with color the black-and-white photograph, they paint with the same palette but with different intensities, languages, shades, and figures. There are no brilliant colors here. What draws the eye are the somber shades of black and white and the combination (not melding) of divergent styles and languages.

• Mr. Rajesh Vangad explains the significance of Varli art and how it portrays Village life (Bhimthadi Jatra, December 31, 2017)

You can buy the Fields of Sight book here

Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, ‘The Sweet and Salty Sea’, 2015, from the series ‘Fields of Sight’, 2013 - ongoing, Acrylic paint on archival pigment print, 62 x 42 in

Gill was born in Chandigarh and lives in New Delhi, India. Vangad lives in Ganjad in Maharashtra, India and paints in the Warli style of painting.

• Alwar Balasubramaniam: Art of substance and absence (TED, September 8, 2010)

“Appearing as a pile of human skin cast to the floor, this sculpture made of sandstone belies its material. To produce it, the artist recast a plaster form of his own body using fiberglass and molded rubber…He describes these as "traces" and "signs of a former presence … the sculpture is nothing but a trace of myself.”” (The Met)

• First City (Hyaline, Talwar Gallery, January 2011)

“In an interview with First City, Bala is quoted as saying: ’I remember, in my first show in New York they asked, ‘where is the Indian-ness in your work?’ Now, the same people, after having watched the body of my work, say, ‘there is too much of Indian philosophy in your work.’ They’re looking for a superficial skin-level Indian-ness, which I’m not about’.” (Talwar Gallery)

• Alwar Balasubramaniam: The reclusive superstar (Mint, Elizabeth Kuruvilla, January 17, 2015)

  • Now, most of the collectors of his [Balasubramaniam] work outside India “come to us because of the quality of the art and not the artist’s passport,” says Talwar.

  • He spent those years working with and learning from different artists, “not only from the so-called fine arts”, but also designers and signboard artists, at screen-printing units, and in the library. “It was not even a choice,” says Bala of his decision to be an artist. “This was the only thing I could do.”

• Visible Invisible: Alwar Balasubramaniam (India 20, Mapin Publishing, June 17, 2013)

“If you leave footprints, people can see that you have walked, but if they can’t see the traces, then they assume that you haven’t walked at all” (Balasubramaniam)

• Beyond the Self: Alwar Balasubramaniam (National Portrait Gallery, Christine Clark, November 6, 2011)

• Alwar Balasubramaniam marks a decade at his studio near Tirunelveli, he invited ART India into his sanctuary…(ART India Magazine, November 12, 2025)

• Artist Alwar Balasubramaniam’s practice alchemises the five elements into art (Stirworld, Sukanya Garg, March 21, 2020)

Self in Progress, 2002, Alwar Balasubramaniam, Fiberglass cast from self, cloth, acrylic, wood 45 × 19 × 33 1/2 in | 114.3 × 48.3 × 85.1 cm

Balasubramaniam studies in Madras and Edinburgh. He currently lives and works in Mumbai.

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See you tomorrow for regularly scheduled programming!

For Singh, home is an important concept not only as a physical space that one inhabits, but something that inhabits us as well. Her practice seems to move between attachment and release

• Talks about emptiness. Sumakshi Singh on breath song and the mapping of illusion

  • Marina Antsiperova

  • Interesting bits:

    • “Do you address your art to those who are no longer with us?

      Yes, so, I don’t know if I consciously address the work to them, but sometimes I feel like the work is coming from them. I can feel their presence inside me and that is prompting me to digest my relationship with that part of me that is feeling a sense of loss or grief in regard to that particular person. I mean even the embroidery and the thread. It’s not a medium that I’d used much before but it came back because, again, it was a connection to my mother.”

    • “I actually hate routine and I can’t keep to one with anything in my life except for my work. That’s because it doesn’t feel like a routine, the time I spend in my studio always feels new, and every time there I’m discovering something new. I have a system that works but also, since it’s always new, I can do it every day. I’m not very disciplined in many things in my life, but with my work I really am. So that’s the one thing that keeps me up.”

• Arts Illustrated

  • Praveena Shivram, June-July 2019

• Art Talk with Sumakshi Singh | IAF Talks

“Going into the studio, holding those... states (of fear or grief or dissonance or rawness) and then watching them get refined and transformed through the process of making into some thing much lighter, it’s a form of healing,”

• Unseeing the Object Lecture / by Sumakshi Singh

  • Jnanpravaha Mumbai, May 14, 2025

• How Indian Artist Sumakshi Singh Is Giving Memories a Physical Presence

  • Pratyush Sarup, September 25, 2025

  • Interesting bits:

    • “The weightless architecture of the thread structures, suspended in space, mirrored the fragmentary nature of memory and the lingering presence of what has been lost, dissolved or transformed.”

    • “Experimenting with various techniques, she found a way to embroider on soluble fabric and then dissolved the background.”

• VOICES - Episode 6 - Sumakshi Singh in conversation with Priya Pall

Actually, I am quite suspicious of definitions.To me, a defined thing is in danger of becoming a dead thing. We tend to put it in a box of the 'known'; we close down its other possibilities, forget to re-evaluate and revisit it and lose out on discovering that possible fountain of fresh, new insights springing from 'the same old place'.

• Sumakshi Singh shares insights into her delicate thread drawings

  • QAGOMA, December 5, 2021