When space itself becomes the canvas
As New Delhi's Latitude 28 gallery turns 15, it gets a new address and a show to celebrate
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Designed for “permeability between artist and audience”, Latitude 28’s new space at New Delhi’s Defence Colony opened with ‘Dramaturgies of Space’, a show where eight artists are probing material, memory and landscape through a shared spatial grammar.
The new address celebrates 15 years of the gallery. Its director Bhavna Kakar describes it as “a reaffirmation of everything Latitude 28 has stood for… accessibility, dialogue, and a deeper engagement with contemporary South Asian art”. The neighbourhood, at the heart of Delhi’s gallery circuit, offers “an environment where audiences can move fluidly between cultural spaces and engage more closely with art and ideas”.
Designed by architect Tushant Bansal, the new space embodies what Kakar calls “a sense of permeability between artist and audience, practice and theory, the visual and the discursive”. This porousness is the foundation of the gallery’s inaugural exhibition curated by Satyajit Dave. The exhibition, says Dave, arises from Kakar’s insistence that the opening show must speak to the architecture. The gallery was not to be a neutral container, but “a site of dramaturgy”.
The show brings together eight artists whose practices reimagine material, memory, and landscape in sharply different ways.
From Assam, Chandan Bez Baruah turns digital photographs into woodcut prints, transforming a traditional craft into atmospheric forestscapes. Firi Rahman responds to the anthropocene through symbolic animal forms and community-rooted archives, extending cartography into questions of inheritance. Juhikadevi Bhanjdeo uses the metaphor of the pocket to explore memory and protection, her indigo-rich textile abstractions carrying trauma, repair, and fortitude.
Handmade Paper, Wool, Black Japan Ink, 2008.
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Monali Meher works with organic materials to trace cycles of time and transformation. While Riyas Komu interrogates displacement, democracy and collective memory through painting, sculpture and installation, Salik Ansari examines power and disappearance via cutout paintings and sculptural allegories. Sudipta Das shapes paper into miniature migrating figures, evoking the precarity of lives in transit. Meanwhile, Waswo X Waswo’s hand-tinted, collaboratively painted portraits gently subvert the colonial image archive.
“What drove the selection of these artists was how they use space as a conceptual method. All these artists understand spatial methodology to engage with viewers,” says Dave. In other words, the show is less about a shared subject than a shared grammar, a way of thinking through space, not just within it.
This grammar resonates with Dave’s own background across design, craft, pedagogy and indigenous knowledge systems. He rejects the idea that these are separate domains: “I don’t find these worlds to be so different. One learns and imagines through these different worlds.” He offers a vivid example: “The spatial play of a kavad (portable wooden shrine) becomes a tool for exhibition design as well as a tool to set the tempo of a classroom conversation.” Blurring boundaries is not a strategy but a habit that, he hopes, visitors will absorb.
Kakar sees the new space as a platform for precisely this expanded form of thinking and making. While the gallery has long championed experimentation — particularly from South Asia — its previous location (Vasant Vihar) did not always allow for the scale and spontaneity she envisioned. The new space, she hopes, will become a place “not just about showing work, but about enabling dialogues that bring artists, writers, researchers, and audiences together”.
— Quadri writes on art and culture
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