Abhirup Bhattacharjee

Arko, my household nickname, meaning Sun, forms the soul of this deeply personal series. Born from introspection and cosmic curiosity, it consists of 12 large oil paintings and 366 unique etching prints exploring metaphysical realms, celestial bodies, and the sun’s role across mythology, numerology, surrealism, and personal transformation. Titles like "Core", "Sungazing", and "Superstar" mirror inner revelations and universal phenomena. The evolving color palette follows seasonal light cycles — spring to winter — mirroring moods from serene to cataclysmic. A “Sun” insignia marks each piece, tying them together as one radiant narrative. I also intend to incorporate augmented reality into select pieces via the use of the Artivive app. Upon completion, I hope to present this series in a singular, immersive exhibition experience at a major art platform like the India Art Fair.

Smaer Saggar

Slideshoweveryday is a storytelling-driven archive project exploring how culture, creativity, and memory collide. It began with a simple impulse, to document visual references that moved me, but quickly grew into a platform that dissects the meaning behind trends, subcultures, and overlooked creative histories. I create long-form Instagram carousels that feel like editorial essays in disguise tracing the roots of diasporic style, under-the-radar artists, forgotten design movements, and culturally rich collaborations. What sets Slideshoweveryday apart is our commitment to context. he project is deeply influenced by the Archive Instagram movement (like Samutaro and Hidden.NY), but Slideshoweveryday is rooted in an Indian lens, localising global stories while spotlighting voices from the margins. Long-term, the goal is to evolve slideshoweveryday into a full-fledged cultural studio, a tastemaker brand that interprets, archives, and co-creates future-defining culture.

Amrapali Shindhe

Project gāthā is a multilingual music and visual storytelling series that reimagines Indian and Western poetry through powerful, cross-cultural collaborations. Born from a desire to move beyond trend-based music releases, the project explores the deeper connection between poetry, heritage, and sound. I aim to create three original songs in collaboration with poets, tribal and contemporary musicians, and filmmakers blending Indian folk traditions with global genres. Each song will be accompanied by a documentary-style video that captures not just the performance, but the process, conversations, and cultural exchanges behind it. This is not just about music it’s about reclaiming space for literature, language, and underrepresented voices in a modern context. project gāthā is a love letter to collaboration and a bridge between generations, cultures, and art forms.

Aarushi Bhawsar, Titikhya Mullick

This project is a multi-sensory time capsule dedicated to preserving the cultural memory of the Bhil and Bhilala tribes of Madhya Pradesh. Known for their vibrant storytelling, ritual practices, and deep connection to the land, these communities hold living knowledge that is at risk of quiet erasure. Rather than treating their heritage as static records, this project seeks to translate it into experiences that can be felt. Through soundscapes, scent, touch, and visual storytelling, we aim to create an archive where the rhythm of a Bhilala harvest song or the earthy fragrance of a Bhil festival become windows into a world often overlooked. Inspired by a decolonial approach to cultural documentation, this work places the community at the center, empowering them to narrate their own stories. It is not merely a record but a living, breathing memory — an invitation to experience tradition as something present, personal, and profoundly human.

Sriparna Dutta

The silent fight: Unveiling Marginalized Narratives is not just a project — it's a commitment, a resistance, a stitched cry for justice. As a caregiving community art practitioner and activist, my work is rooted in lived experience. I walk with the women, I sit with the children, I listen, and I create alongside them. Through embroidery, painting, storytelling, and fabric books, I archive voices that have been silenced for generations. These are not just crafts — they are testimonies of pain, survival, and resilience. Over four months, I will collect over 1,000 works — paintings, stitched narratives, personal objects — each carrying a story that society has refused to see. In Nanoor and Bharatpur, I will live, eat, cry, and create with the communities. A collective Kantha quilt will emerge — layered with memories, resistance, and shared breaths. This is not just an archive. This is a fight. A movement. A mirror held up to society’s hidden wounds.

Sarthak Ray

Project hamsadhwani is a genre-defying sonic ensemble that melds the rich textures of cinematic and ambient music with the raw intensity of grunge and the transcendence of Hindustani space rock. Founded on the principles of musical exploration and cultural fusion, the project is a testament to the boundless possibilities of sound.

Mayank

Queer childhoods is a media, research and archival project in which through facilitating readings and conversations over childhood photographs in family albums of queer individuals, I am building an open media archive. I have also created a photographic performance that gives a curated glimpse into its concerns and conversations: https://drive.google.com/open?id=15wFfaK5C5TqS8uJOSW5DgV32kVs2kWs1 By prioritising the agency of the adult queer individual in rereading these photographs, facilitating a queer gaze into one’s own past and ‘listening’ to the photograph beyond seeing, the project complicates notions of visuality. It approaches images through listening and orality in order to attune to the silences and ghostly spectres that may not be visible 'inside' the image but are there in the individual's imaginary. The project began from a very personal place and through conversations initiated through my own childhood photographs.

Jahnvi Raj

Piya Rang Mitti is a folk musical inspired by the life of Bhakti saint Meerabai. It explores a long walk across the desert and unravels several struggles and desires of rural South Asian women, folklores about their madness and their inner quest for enlightenment. It follows the life of a young girl Runjhun who finds herself stranded between the memories of her mother and the music of the desert, all the while struggling to make ends meet as an idol sculptor. The musical is an interdisciplinary intervention that aims to bring together several mediums of story telling such as theatre, dance, music, paintings and puppetry on one stage. It is inspired also by our fieldwork engagement with women of Andore village of Rajasthan.

Aliya Khan

Chimbai is a documentary about a 400-year-old Koli fishing village in the heart of Mumbai - one of the city’s last coastal communities. As urban pressures grow, the film preserves chimbai’s layered cultural landscape in the face of sweeping change. Blending documentary footage with music, illustration, and poetry, we’re working with local artists, musicians, and children to co-create a multidimensional portrait of the village. In addition to the film, we are building a short-form content repository to make chimbai’s heritage accessible to wider audiences. This project challenges top-down documentation by inviting communities to represent themselves. It aims not only to archive what exists, but to strengthen what can grow from it: cultural equity through creative pathways, connecting grassroots artists with wider networks in Mumbai and beyond.

Nayan

A roof of one's own is a personal, hybrid documentary about the slow disappearance of Barsatis — rooftop homes that once dotted Delhi’s skyline, offering shelter to students, artists, migrants, and working-class families. What began as a historical exploration of these spaces turned into something more intimate: a meditation on home, loss, and belonging. I moved to Delhi two years ago from rural Madhya Pradesh and ended up living in a Barsati myself. Over time, I realised that I wasn’t just documenting a vanishing form of housing; I was also processing my own complicated relationship with home, shaped by grief and migration. The film blends observational footage, voiceover, and self-aware commentary to reflect on who gets to belong in a city that’s always reinventing itself, and what gets erased in the name of progress. It’s also an attempt to reimagine what the nonfiction medium can look like: honest, sharp, and fun.

Ujjwal Agarwal / KALA

Raga.fm is a generative music project by Ujjwal Agarwal that explores the deep-rooted philosophy of Indian classical ragas and their relationship with time. It features an intelligent algorithm that composes real-time melodic progressions based on ancient raga rules like aaroh, avroh, pakad, vadi, and samvadi. The system serves ragas appropriate to the listener’s current time of day, creating a meditative audio stream that feels personal and timeless. Complementing this digital experiment is Ujjwal’s ongoing attempt to build electro-acoustic instruments using solenoids, such as a modern jal tarang powered by an ESP32 microcontroller. These instruments create physical vibrations and real sounds, merging digital intelligence with traditional musical materiality. Together, the projects reflect Ujjwal’s fascination with time, sound, and computation — redefining how we experience classical music through code, interface, and tactility.

Kash

On a sweltering summer day, Kudrat, 30s, witnesses a young girl become the subject of a stranger’s unsettling attention during a crowded bus ride. The film Babygals (bbg) confronts a violence that often begins quietly through small, calculated acts disguised as kindness. I was compelled to tell this story because grooming, and the way it thrives in public, remains largely invisible. It hides behind politeness, age, and male authority. By placing this narrative in a bus, a space of shared silence, unspoken rules, and everyday negotiations, I wanted to amplify the claustrophobia of being watched, followed, judged, and targeted. Kudrat’s reaction is a reflection of the relentless fear women carry with them, even after the bus has stopped. It is the lingering cost of confrontation in a world where the danger does not end with the ride. It follows you.

Aswin Prakash

Balaramapuram project explores the cultural, historical, and class dynamics surrounding the iconic Kerala saree. Rooted in the southern district of Thiruvananthapuram, it investigates how this weaving tradition — once tied to royal patronage — shaped Kerala’s visual identity. The project contrasts this legacy with contemporary shifts in labor, value, and representation, especially in comparison to the cultural aesthetics of Kerala’s northern districts. Through textiles, oral histories, and collaborative design, it aims to revive and reframe balaramapuram’s significance within modern Kerala’s socio-cultural landscape, questioning who gets to define heritage and whose stories are preserved.

Varoon P. Anand

Adbhut is an immersive AI-powered performance installation that captures the profound moment of wonder when technology enables impossible communication. The project explores breakthrough moments - when someone who has lost their voice speaks again through AI synthesis, when a grandmother in rural Punjab suddenly understands her grandson's English poetry through real-time translation, when a child with autism finds words they never had through assistive technology.

Sayantan Sharma

"I SUGAR YOU BONE TO BONE আমি তোমায় হাড়ে হাড়ে চিনি (I know you intimately)" The sculptural installation can be approached from more than one corner and each would arrive at the epicenter that discusses the issue of food security - a pressing concern of today’s society. I have visually attempted to give shape to the complex issue by acknowledging the peripheral issues affecting the moot. Each entry point to the structural puzzle acknowledges other strong socio-political-economic issues intertwined with each other, making the structure complicated. The freestanding installation is primarily inspired by organic forms that adhere to the logic of cardboard puzzles. By manipulating the organic bone-like form, I conceptualized each side of the plates to convey my concerns about the facets that influence food security. While planning and executing this piece, I was convinced that the socio-ecological systemic complexity like our body.

Jayesh Patil

Many creatives — artists, writers, musicians, designers, and anyone who identifies as “creative” — often feel stuck between surges of inspiration and complete creative blocks. They lack community support and frequently feel isolated in their journey. Drawing from my own path — reading Steal Like an Artist, The Artist’s Way, and especially Daily Rituals — I built a web prototype (artistrituals.in) that matches your daily habits to those of historic icons. The long term goal is to create a one-stop productivity and community platform for creatives of all kinds.

Sanjoy Rakshit

The concept of the "invisible guillotine" captures the silent, unseen forces shaping our world today. It represents hidden rules and motives that strip away our humanity, dignity, morality, and freedom without us even realizing it. This invisible blade cuts deeper than any physical weapon, affecting lives in subtle but profound ways. As an artist, I feel this loss personally. Fifty-one years of my life have slipped away — my childhood, my youth — all overshadowed by this relentless force. Alone in this vast world, I find solace only in the stars above. Yet, every night, I witness the bloodshed surrounding me. Despite striving to be kind and rhythmic in my actions, my spirit feels hollow, my emotions starved. This is but one example among many, reflecting a larger truth.

pause.dxa by Sahitya and Harsh

Bedtime sonic fables is a sonic experience designed to transport participants through a dream-like journey, mirroring the fluid transitions of the sleep cycle. Blending Dhrupad vocals with live electronic soundscapes and acoustic sound textures the performance creates an evolving landscape of shifting sonic states. Inspired by the nonlinear nature of dreams, each section represents a distinct dream world, flowing seamlessly from ethereal expanses to abstract noise, from drifting through the ocean’s depths to slipping in and out of the surrounding soundscape, where distant echoes of life linger like memories between sleep and wakefulness. At the heart of the space, a water cymatics installation visually translates sound into organic, hypnotic patterns, allowing audiences to both hear and see the vibrations of the sonic environment.

Antariksh Records

For our 7th anniversary, we wish to produce a compilation album in the form of limited-edition vinyl records and cassette tapes. We have noticed a significant increase in initiatives promoting vinyl culture and analog technologies nationwide. We believe this analog resurgence can be attributed to seeking a lack of algorithmic surveillance. We are seeking a reduction in the pace of life, which offers a concrete way of being in the world. Alongside this, through our project we wish to stick to our resolve of giving a platform to lesser-known, yet equally talented Indian artists. These artists, for the lack of access, are not fully recognized for their otherwise outstanding work among the global Eurocentric communities and electronic dance music cultures. This project, hence, aims to set a benchmark in the cultural landscape of electronic dance music, not just in India, but also on a global scale.

Arindam Manna

This project explores the intertwined stories of tradition, technological change, and environmental transition in Arjangarh, a unique Delhi locality. Central to this is the Guru Shyam Lal Akhara, whose wrestling traditions sustain physical culture, community connections, and ancestral practices amid rapid urban change. It also highlights Arjangarh’s strategic military role, marked by a Cold War-era defense installation, and its proximity to the ecologically vital Delhi Ridge. Using immersive fieldwork — including visits, drawing, painting, ambient sound and video recordings and photography — this work examines how akharas function as living vessels of local history, endurance and adaptation. The resulting multimedia installation brings to life these connected stories of place, body, and memory, inviting audiences to engage with heritage as a dynamic, layered fabric shaped by complex urban forces.

Bhuvanesh Ajithkumar Sheeba

A short film that explores the grief over their son's death sparks a conflict between the father and his son's friend, Nisha, whom he blames for the tragedy. Can we forget our deepest truma can we forgive someone for our unintentional fault. It is a quiet tale of forgival and guilt.

House of Katha

In the era of constant notifications, 10 minute food delivery, 15 seconds content pieces and 3 seconds attention span, we invite you to pause, calm down and reflect. Our immersive installation explores how today's constant digital flow, like a raging river, overwhelms us. We feel drowned in the ocean of information which is meant to help us. Step into a space where visuals depicting the daily information overload are projected onto the walls and speakers. Approach the console which captures your heartbeat, and as you breathe slowly, the chaotic audio and visuals will calm down, mirroring your inner peace.

Farah Mulla

Erasure is built from cassette tapes recorded during a time when I was moving through the aftermath of a relationship — one that left behind a tangle of unsaid saids. Over the course of a year or more, I recorded fragments: voice notes, ambient soundscapes, quiet reflections. As the dust of that connection began to settle, these sounds layered, blurred, and distorted — just like memory does. Eventually, a decade later, I pulled the magnetic ribbons from the cassettes and began weaving them into a tapestry. What began as an attempt to speak became something else entirely — a letter that starts in language and ends in the noise of silence. A map of emotions that were once felt but could never be fully expressed. The process embraced erasure not as removal, but as a method of inscription — an act of drawing silence.

Nitish Jain

A chance to pause and reset. First-hand is a unique, multisensory experience designed to counteract the overstimulation of screen-heavy culture. Participants are invited on a tactile, olfactory, and gustatory journey. Through blindfolds, headphones, and guided interactions, it creates a space for pausing and enhancing the imagination. Rooted in Dr. Seligman’s PERMA model of positive psychology, it promotes mental well-being by reducing fatigue, burnout, and apathy. Marvellous stories from the animal kingdom, told through sensory stimuli, foster a deeper relationship with nature encouraging curiosity, happiness, engagement, and meaning. Ideal for those feeling disconnected in an accelerating world, first-hand serves as a restorative, immersive “reset button”, bridging mental wellness and environmental awareness through an artistic experience.