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.

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.

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.