When Materials Remember
Join us at Gallery XXL for When Materials Remember, a conversation featuring artists Jumu and Harsh Nambiar, Almost Gods Founder and Creative Director Dhruv Khurana, and Gallery XXL curator Sarah Malik.
This conversation explores the memories embedded within materials and the ways culture is transmitted through tangible forms. Moving across art, design, and creative practice, the speakers will reflect on how materiality opens portals to cultural resilience, world-building, and the politics of belonging.
Drawing from their multidisciplinary practices, Jumu, Harsh, and Dhruv will trace how symbols, colours, and materials intersect to construct worlds rooted in lived histories, inherited narratives, and imagined pasts, revealing how we reconcile with these histories in the present.
Time : 6 - 7 PM
Date : Sunday, February 1, 2026
Location : A-277, Defence Colony, New Delhi - 110024
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MODERATOR
Sarah Malik | Curator at Gallery XXL
Sarah is a curator based in New Delhi, India, whose practice centers on the politics of intersectionality in visual art. Emerging from an early engagement with questions of representation and construction of gender, their work has evolved to foreground narratives from diverse subsections of society within the Indian context, particularly as expressed through urban and contemporary art movements.
Working closely with interdisciplinary and visual art practitioners, Sarah has curated exhibitions with Gallery XXL and Terrain.art, and has been involved in fair and festival presentations at India Art Fair, Art Mumbai, and the Mumbai Urban Art Festival.
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PANELISTS
Dhruv Khanna | Founder and Creative Director of Almost Gods
Dhruv Khurana is a Delhi-based Founder and Creative Director of Almost Gods, an India-rooted, idea-led fashion and cultural brand launched in 2018. He views fashion as cultural infrastructure, where every piece, object, and experience is shaped with intention. Rooted in Indian craft and shaped by contemporary ideas of mysticism and power, Almost Gods treats clothing as meaning rather than ornament, resisting simplification as it grows into a cultural platform.
Harsh Nambiar | Artist
Harsh Nambiar (b. 1989) is a painter who lives and works in New Delhi, India. Working primarily with oil, his canvases transport us to a plane where imagination and history intersect, reverberating with mythopoetic echoes. Inspired by altarpieces and illuminations in the traditions of Romanesque and Gothic painting, Harsh sustains the tension between enchantment and the uncanny. Resisting the immediacy of meaning, the contemplation of these paintings invites a recognition of and devotion to that which may remain always partly unknowable. They are neither allegories nor fables, but visitations imparting brief, wondrous and indelible traces on the soul of the viewer.
Jumu | Artist
Jurena Muñoz Lagunas, known as Jumu, is a Berlin-based urban contemporary artist born in Hannover in 1990 to Peruvian and Chilean parents. Trained in Design Studies in Mallorca, her practice evolved through street culture, costume design, and material-led narration. A co-founder of the Guapo Sapo Collective, she has painted murals worldwide and works across painting, sculpture, performance, and installation. Drawing from the cultural heritage of Abya Yala, Jumu’s work centers on identity, migration, and ancestral memory, portraying indigenous women as powerful figures.
