The Archiving Skin
Arieno Kera, Naina Dalal, Prabhu Harsoor, Renuka Rajiv, Riya Chandwani, Rumit Donga,
Shoneize Akhtar, Vinay Gusain
The Archiving Skin begins with the premise that portraiture, across centuries and cultures, has served as one of humanity’s most vital forms of...
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The Archiving Skin
Arieno Kera, Naina Dalal, Prabhu Harsoor, Renuka Rajiv, Riya Chandwani, Rumit Donga,
Shoneize Akhtar, Vinay Gusain
The Archiving Skin begins with the premise that portraiture, across centuries and cultures, has served as one of humanity’s most vital forms of remembering. More than a likeness, a portrait is a surface upon which time, identity, and experience are inscribed, a skin that absorbs, records, and preserves the traces of the worlds it moves through. From ancient frescoes to contemporary digital renderings, portraiture has continually reflected not only the individuals it depicts but also the shifting social, political, and artistic landscapes of its creation.
The exhibition explores portraiture as both document and revelation, a dynamic space where the act of seeing becomes intertwined with understanding the many ways humans leave their marks upon one another and upon time itself.
Nagaland born artist, Arieno Kera’s drawings turn toward the symbolic and emotional weight of cultural memory, where the rhododendron becomes a metaphor for femininity as a surface shaped by admiration, expectation, and resistance. Bangalore based multidisciplinary artist, Renuka Rajiv’s intimate portraits traces the fragile ecologies of friendship, affection, and loneliness, while Baroda based Rumit Donga’s frescoed portraits bear the corporeal imprints of labour, endurance, and socio-economic erasure. In dialogue with these works are Delhi based Printmaker, Vinay Gusain’s psychologically charged fragments which extends the inquiry into objects and postures that quietly retain lived pressure. Mumbai based Riya Chandwani’s imageries holds fractured histories of displacement and inheritance while Baroda based senior painter, Naina Dalal’s lyrical poetic paintings are profound archives of lived experience, giving voice to personal and often unspoken emotions. Mumbai based self-taught artist Shoneize Akhtar and Karnataka based Prabhu Harsoor turn inward toward domestic memory and folk-inflected symbolism, grounding the exhibition in emotional, cultural, and everyday experience.
Across the show, portraiture unfolds as a shared language, where bodies, gestures, and surfaces become sites of memory and inscription, holding the power to document, interrogate, and reimagine the human experience.
Curated by Shreemoyee Moitra
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