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. 

Aesthetics are an archive of cultural evolution. This is what artist, writer, and curator Imaad Majeed showcases in KANNOORU, an art-based research project which reproduces Sri Lankan Sufi sonics through digital sampling methods and Tamil folk forms of lament.

In an extension of this research process, Imaad joins TRI Art & Culture on Saturday, 20 April for a sonic poetics workshop that engages participants in exploring their own cultural heritage and environment through memory-based music to create archival soundscapes and accompanying poetics. Across the course of a morning and an afternoon, the workshop will guide participants through close listening, reflection, soundscape shaping, and poem composition — all culminating in a soundscape demonstration and poetic recitation.

What is the sound of a culture washing away?

This is the question that multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator Imaad Majeed found themself asking when they discovered a digital archive of Sri Lankan Sufi sonics during Ramadan 2021. Since then, Imaad has further explored this archival content in KANNOORU, an art-based research project which draws on digital sampling methods and Tamil folk forms of lament to mourn the cultural loss experienced by Muslim communities across Sri Lanka. Through splicing and synthesizing, Imaad creates music that explores identity, community, memory, ancestry, and spirituality. The result: rhythms of the daff and darbuka struck in staccato; voices of devotees stretched into ambient wash; melodies drawn from Arabic maqam and regional influences interwoven by a synthesized harmonium. Alchemized, these sonic elements evoke a lost past while gesturing to a future that may never exist.

As part of KANNOORU in Kolkata, TRI Art & Culture welcomes Imaad Majeed into our galleries for Surround Sounds: Listening to Cultural Loss, a lecture demonstration and live sample set showcasing Imaad’s distinctive process of archival deconstruction to produce contemporary lamentation.

Beginning with the transformative work of pioneering artists like Kraftwerk and iconic records that established new sonic territories, this lecture demonstration and listening session explores how Germany’s early techno scene fostered a culture of innovation, laying the groundwork for electronic music worldwide.

When the genre entered India, electronic sounds blended with local music traditions to create unique, hybrid forms. Through a curated selection of vinyl records — including defining moments from Germany’s electronic legacy and India’s growing scene — we trace the artistic, technological, and cultural shifts that continue to shape electronic music globally.

Cities are dense tapestries of homes, commerce, transport, and human experience. To explore a city’s identity is to examine these layers and the histories that interweave them. The City in the Archive presents a visual and historical reflection on Kolkata, guided by art historian Dr. Tapati Guha-Thakurta and researcher Dr. Sukanya Mitra.

Drawing on Dr. Guha-Thakurta’s 2011 exhibition and publication of the same name, the conversation examines images from the CSSS archive of 20th-century Kolkata. This exploration considers the city as both a site of production and a milieu of industrial, social, and aesthetic formation. Positioned alongside Sudhir Patwardhan’s Cities: Built, Broken, the discussion invites audiences to reflect on urban life, visual culture, and the historical shaping of cityscapes.