People, Places, Things: D-40 & D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi

Belonging to someone, somewhere or something is an experiential arrangement. These social relations form the crux of the human behavioral sciences, which seek to study why human beings engage in certain behaviors over others due to a host of contextual factors, including self-motivations and external influences. But often, from an individual’s colloquial point-of-view, navigating daily worlds full of people, places and things feels like a swim in a deep, deep river of emotional potency, inspiring joy, delight, confusion, anger, ecstasy, charm, panic, sadness, hunger, contentment and other happenings. Often, in a singular act of being a lifetime’s worth of plot can play out.

After all – ‘all the world's a stage,’ wrote William Shakespeare.

The unconquerable debate of the theatre of life frequently raises its voice in the quiet chaos and conflicts of reality, holding steadfast to the everything-ness of everything and the nothing-ness of nothing with symptomatic vulnerability. With the present moment unenviably tinged with textures of the past and future, and the concept of here invariably alerting one to the idea of elsewhere – performers must perform their way through time, truth and beliefs to arrive at the storytelling with which life suffuses. And so, performers are inextricably linked to their performances, a dramaturgy compelled by the performer’s instincts, accessible props and situational sets that nurture our lived circumstances, however grandiose or banal. Without the endurance and expression of the self-as-performer undertaking these excursions in time and space, the world as we describe it would be a static reservoir of storage; an accumulation of facts, rather than an anthropology of narratives.

People, Places, Things dives into the energy of intimate environments and immediate interactions, zooming into the narrative cuts – often interior, hidden or unacknowledged – that in-turn grace the big picture of inter-relationships and the narratives that grow out of them. Spread across both our modern and contemporary gallery spaces, this exhibition explores a philosophy of lived spaces as a site of ongoing contact, communication and change rather than observing correlations as conclusive manifestations of an individual’s identity.