Delhi Contemporary Art Week: 6 galleries, 2 exhibitions, and a wider view of the world
The event returns for its ninth edition, allowing people to encounter art without the scale and commercial pressure of a conventional fair
The Delhi Contemporary Art Week (DCAW) returns to Bikaner House for its ninth edition on August 31. Six women-led Delhi galleries — Blueprint12, Exhibit 320, Gallery Espace, Latitude 28, Shrine Empire and Vadehra Art Gallery — showcase the best of art at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), while two curated exhibitions (‘Bye-Bye Monsoon’ by Adwait Singh and ‘This Animate Earth’ by Annalisa Mansukhani) carry the ‘Week’ into the LTC and the Main Building.
DCAW offers a cross-section of practice from India and South Asia, circling climate, land, memory, identity, material and belonging. Gallery Espace’s ‘Presenting Abundance’ asks the viewer to slow down. Rooted partly in miniature traditions but moving towards abstraction, it foregrounds detail, surface, colour and ornament. Waswo X Waswo, Viswanath Kuttum, Nandini Bagla Chirimar, Kishor Shinde, Manjunath Kamath and Shobha Broota are among the artists whose works will be displayed.
Renu Modi, founder/director of Gallery Espace, calls DCAW “much more than an exhibition platform”: a place to foster new conversations and reach a wider public. Through their continued participation, she hopes to “strengthen the cultural fabric of the city while supporting artists and expanding appreciation for contemporary artistic practices”.
‘Village and City Life I’ by JK.
Blueprint12 turns to the body. ‘Ways of Being Seen’ spans painting, sculpture, photography, textiles, ceramics, drawing and printmaking. If JK looks at queer visibility, Nameera Irshad’s work delves into displacement and political violence. Shoneize Akhtar looks at maternal memory, Dhiraj Rabha at communities affected by insurgency, and Dhruvi Jain and Annanya Dhanda at vulnerability and grief.
Shruti Parekh, Mojahid Musa, Shreeya Dwivedi and Rahul Ghosh are also showing their works. “We were drawn to the figure because it is one of the most enduring subjects in art, yet it is never a fixed one,” says Mandira Lamba of Blueprint12.
Latitude 28’s ‘Meridian’ brings 14 practices into relation through painting, textile, photography, thread, sculpture, drawing and assemblage. Hasseena Suresh, Sudipta Das, Farhat Ali, Yogesh Ramkrishna, Pradeep Thalawatta, Viraj Khanna, Sai Karnekota and Kishwar Kiani take up inheritance, land, the body, folklore, domestic histories and the archive.
“What excites me about this 9th edition of DCAW is how much it has grown into a real meeting point for Indian contemporary art,” says Latitude 28 founder Bhavna Kakar.
Shrine Empire also avoids a single theme. Its 14 artists from across South Asia work through research, process and material enquiry. Amitava, Arun Dev, Chris Basumatary, Divya Singh, Jagath Weerasinghe, Paribartana Mohanty, Sajan Mani and Shanthamani Muddaiah dwell on memory, landscape, displacement and social and political histories.
Exhibit 320 takes a more material route. Barkha Gupta examines home, architecture and the body; Jaimini Jariwala uses unravelling, cyanotype and imprint to think about memory and erasure; and Maitreyi Desai turns tree rings into meditations on rootedness and home. Deepak Kumar, Wahida Ahmed, Richa Arya, Priyantha Udagedara and Yasmin bring in labour, migration, ecology and displacement.
“Delhi Contemporary Art Week has become an important moment in the city’s cultural calendar,” says Exhibit 320 director Rasika Kajaria, who values its “spirit of collaboration and dialogue” and the chance to present artists engaging with “memory, materiality, and belonging”.
‘Studio Fragment’ by Anju Dodiya.
Vadehra Art Gallery’s ‘A Geography of Tender Things’ has the most openly emotional title of the six. In the works of its artists, place can be physical, remembered, psychic or unsettled. Anju Dodiya’s ‘Studio Fragments’, first shown at Frieze Masters in 2025, appears alongside a new copper-plate painting by Zaam Arif, woven ikat works by Hylozoic/Desires, three new paintings by Sudhir Patwardhan and a photorealist work by Atul Dodiya, continuing his engagement with cinema. “Delhi Contemporary Art Week is an important moment for the city’s art community, bringing together galleries, artists, collectors and audiences,” says Roshini Vadehra.
In Adwait Singh’s ‘Bye-Bye Monsoon’, extreme weather is the starting point. Taking its cue from Amitav Ghosh’s account of the tornado that struck north Delhi in March 1978, it uses shifting monsoon patterns to think about a climatic disorder. Real and metaphorical storms ask what has brought us here. Artists include Paribartana Mohanty, Sarker Protick, Ravi Agarwal, Shanthamani Muddaiah, Joya Mukerjee Logue, Firi Rahman and Yasmin Jahan Nupur.
Annalisa Mansukhani’s ‘This Animate Earth’ looks down to plants, roots and soil. It treats the botanical world as a place where memory, labour, caste, empire, ownership and extraction meet, while asking whose knowledge of plants and land has been valued. It looks at networks of roots, pollination and symbiosis, moving beyond a human-centred view of landscape.
What DCAW continues to offer, nine editions on, is a concentrated week in which contemporary art can be encountered without the scale and commercial pressure of a conventional fair. The weather outside, the plants underfoot, the places we leave, the bodies we inhabit, the memories held by cloth, paper, paint, soil and archive, almost everything, it seems, has found its way into Bikaner House.
— Quadri writes on art and culture
