Food tells stories that history books often don’t. Set within TRI’s winter season exhibition ADDA: The Third Space, Text, Tastes and Tales of Mishti brings together a room of diners for a seven-course mini meal by Handpicked by Amrita, where Bengali mishti becomes the lens through which Kolkata’s histories, hierarchies, and cultural memory are explored and savoured. 

Woven through each course is the ethnographic research of Dr. Ishita Dey, drawn from her publication Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal, a work that reads recipes as archival maps, tracing stories of migration, trade, and ecology embedded within the region’s most beloved sweets. The afternoon journeys through sweet shops, homes, fairs, and festivals across Bengal, asking what mishti reveals about who we are, where we come from, and what we choose to pass on. 

Clothesmaker Kallol Datta is known for pushing the boundaries of structural experimentation in pattern cutting. In so doing, Datta skews traditional geometry to create unwearable silhouettes which shroud, swaddle, and cocoon the body inhabiting the textile object. This practice employs the reconstruction, repurposing, and restructuring of donated pieces of clothing – garments that hold memory, emotion, and history – to negotiate larger questions on work and the politics of craftsmanship, on the relationship between labourer and user, and on ideas revolving around research as production.

Re-Forming welcomes artist Kallol Datta and fashion writer Vinita Makhija to the TRI Terrace for essay readings and a conversation on the process of reformation. This iteration of TRI Talks, our ongoing conversation series, takes place as part of closing events for TRI’s inaugural exhibitions curated by Experimenter including Volume 3, Issue 2 | 2.0, a solo immersive exhibition by Kallol Datta.

Soft Circulations, curated by Offset Projects, is more than a reading room, it is an invitation to deeper attention and an exploration of connection. Moving between the personal and the collective, this exhibition asks how memory, geography, and the body flow together to form the archives that shape our lives.

As part of the monsoon season closing events, the Collective Reading brings the TRI community into dialogue with Soft Circulations through a walkthrough and interactive session led by curator Anshika Varma. Participants will first journey through the exhibition space, guided by Anshika’s reflections on the curatorial process, before engaging in a communal encounter with the photobooks on display.

Unlike traditional walkthroughs, this collective reading is designed to circulate like the exhibition itself, through shared conversation, reflection, and exchange. Together, participants will explore the intertwined narratives of memory, history, and belonging that flow through the works on view, reaffirming the exhibition’s call to connect the “we” within the “me.”