BENDING AND BREAKING: Presenting the works of AIKO, Anikesa Dhing, Ashna Malik, Avinash Kumar, Bhushan Bhombale, Khatra, Nabi and Sadhna Prasad

To bend is to alter, stretch, and curve form until it yields; to break is to arrive at a point of irreversible shift where fragments can give way to newer wholes. This exhibition presents works by 8 artists whose practices inhabit the threshold between distortion and rupture, memory and material, time and perception — using bending and breaking as not only an approach and method, but also a gesture and philosophy for reimagining play. As each piece loosens normative structures of form, narrative, material and aesthetics, the curation invites audiences to hold a gaze with the artworks as they simultaneously move and shift through them and experience relational nuances in between work, machine and play.

Delhi based artist Nabi’s works open the exhibition like alchemic portals, where gouache, silk, canvas, glass and acrylic transform into mutable surfaces of myth and remembrance, presented through images of candle trees, goblets and apothecary bottles that illuminate a world in a state of flux. As one steps further into the space-time of bending and breaking, Japanese American artist AIKO reveals characters who are defiant, humorous, soft yet unyielding – occupying street imaginations to reroute dominant narratives as a way of claiming the public with desire and dissent.

A rush of recollection is suddenly prompted through Ahmedabad based artist Avinash Kumar’s handmade Ferris Wheel Toy, where memory between motion and stasis, akin to a relic behind glass, comes to the forefront. In Mumbai based Sadhna Prasad’s paintings, colour slips across to abstraction and creates a passageway between the intuitiveness of childhood and the identities we embody as adults. This is further extended through Vadodara-based artist Anikesa Dhing’s objects that shed function and become suspended time-markers, holding traces of use while proposing that what remains after utility might dissolve, percolate, stay and/or dilate. With this, an encounter with Delhi based artist Ashna Malik’s surfaces bend and fracture perception even more, as layered lines unfold many planes and suggest that vision itself can be continually reformed through form. This re-configuration applied to materiality, then becoming mythological, as Bhushan Bhombale’s sculptures of scrap metal, rubber and industrial remnants, present corrosion as patinas for resilience and ecological decay. Leading the onlooker into (un)stable terrains, Vadodara based artist Khatra, through kinetic frames, ultimately presenting how street-derived forms can glitch, multiply and loop into dense typographic fields.

Across these works, play emerges as a critical methodology, with an attempt to unfasten more structures, question progress, inhabit multiple temporalities and continually step into novel states of invention. The exhibition, ultimately, presents that spirit of disruption where a departure from linear narratives can lead toward an inquiry into quiet and abrupt changes. The curation, materiality and form – inviting the audiences to hold their gaze, as they shift it, and experience: a renewal, as well as the insistence that many possibilities for alternate narratives get unleashed within the process of bending and breaking.