Khadi, a Canvas brings together two of India’s most transformative figures, Raja Ravi Varma and Mahatma Gandhi, not as historical subjects, but as living forces whose influence continues to shape how India sees, makes, and values art. 

Raja Ravi Varma democratises the image. Through the lithograph press, his paintings travel beyond palace walls into everyday homes, making fine art a shared cultural inheritance. Gandhi democratises the material. By reviving khadi and championing self-sufficiency, he turns the act of weaving into a statement of dignity, identity, and independence. Working only years apart, the two men together redefine what art can do and who it can belong to. 

At the heart of the exhibition are 18 handwoven khadi saris, created by tribal women from Srikakulam who, trained from scratch in the intricate Jamdani hand-weave technique, reinterpret Ravi Varma’s iconic imagery in woven form. Each sari took between six months and two years to complete, using silk yarns and 600 natural dye shades developed from plant and vegetable sources. Shown alongside original chromolithograph prints, lithographic stones, and khadi production tools, the works foreground process as much as beauty, the labour, the knowledge, and the quiet skill embedded in both printmaking and weaving. 

Across two floors of the TRI galleries, the exhibition traces a continuum. On the ground floor, the saris are placed in conversation with decorative art objects, from Japanese porcelain to German Majolica tiles, that situate them within the long and far-reaching tradition of Ravi Varma adaptations. On the first floor, the narrative shifts to khadi’s journey from Gandhi’s political vision to contemporary textile revivalism. 

The result is a meditation on legacy, on how images travel, how crafts survive, and how two remarkable individuals helped weave the aesthetic identity of modern India. 

ADDA: The Third Space is an immersive exhibition curated by St+art India Foundation at TRI Art & Culture, with support from Asian Paints and KCT Group CSR. The exhibition invites audiences into liminal spaces by presenting narratives that exist across multiple boundaries and thresholds, engaging all six senses (sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch, and proprioception) to catalyse a collective immersion into the microcosms, undergrounds, and subcultures of Indian streets, as well as the enclosed spaces of everyday inhabitation. 

At its core, ADDA poses a central inquiry: what happens when the street steps over the threshold and the home spills into the lane? How do walls, bodies, and minds become porous, objects become hybrid, and memories turn collective? In reframing third spaces not merely as physical thresholds but as futures of urban belonging, the exhibition asks its visitors to imagine new ways of being together, through an exploration of Kolkata’s borderlessness, the fluidity of its pulse, and the hybridity of its culture. It seeks to dissolve the dichotomies of public and private, work and play, home and world, inside and outside. 

The journey through the exhibition unfolds across the architecture of TRI itself. 

On the building’s exterior facade, Baroda-based visual artist Khatra merges Bengali and English scripts across TRI’s windows, turning the façade into a public-facing visual poem and a proverbial deliberation on the layered languages that occupy Kolkata’s streets and are reflected back to its inhabitants. 

Upon entering, a large, soft installation by Doyel Joshi and Neil Ghose Balser of Howareyoufeeling.studio echoes the rhythms of domestic life while reimagining the private bed as a space for public intimacy. At the anchor of the exhibition, visitors are invited into a collective performance of rest, lying, gathering, and settling together in a space that activates proprioception through shared presence. In a city where the adda has always made the street a kind of home, the Shared Bed asks what it means to truly be at ease with one another, to let the boundaries between stranger and neighbour dissolve into something quieter and more generous. 

In the patio, Anikesa Dhing evokes the nostalgia of childhood through the colours and textures of candies, tracing the body’s memory of taste and inviting reflection on joy, recollection, and the sentimental lives of everyday objects. 

On TRI’s spiralling stairwell, NABI stages a totemic installation of embroidered masks, colour, light, and shadow in a masquerade of mirage, exploring ancestry, imagination, and the hybridity of identity, prompting visitors to reconsider what is seen, unseen, or overlooked. 

Moving through the passageway, Akash Raj Halankar reshapes the space into a study of sight through a field of coloured pyramids drawn from Asian Paints’ Chromacosm universe. Each surface alters the viewer’s orientation, turning geometry into an instrument of perception and softening the boundaries of the white cube into a moment of quiet re-seeing. 

Deeper into the space, Zero and Kolkata-based hip-hop artist Deep Adhikary draw on the etymology of graffiti from the Latin graffio, meaning “a scratch,” to create a hybrid toilette, kitchen, and scratch room that invites a tactile exploration of tangibility and street-writing as collective expression. Alongside this, researcher and sociologist Dr. Ishita Dey activates the olfactory dimension of the same spaces through scent-based engagements rooted in the politics of gender and caste, layering smell into the sensory palimpsest of the everyday. 

On the open terrace, Sethuraman and Beatnyk present an audio-visual installation that reimagines a chessboard made only of pawns, the aristocratic pieces conspicuously absent, as an embodiment of Kolkata’s street culture. The work reframes listening as an act of participation and community-making in the building of porous and plural futures. 

Together, these works form a sensorium for the Third Space, an open-ended conversation through artistic gestures that propose the city itself as a collective home, where art becomes a living dialogue between the street and the institution, the interior and the exterior. ADDA ultimately seeks to reshape every passerby into an inhabitant of new explorations, uncovering alternate histories of art, community, the home, the street, and the city. 

Sea of Fists by Prabhakar Pachpute is an exhibition that reinterprets the gestures and motions central to social movements. Now on display in India for the first time, the immersive installation draws inspiration from the Indian farmers’ protests of 2017–2018.

Through dream-like landscapes and anamorphic figures, Pachpute highlights resistance emerging from the environmental and social impacts of resource extraction. Coming from a mining and farming community in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district, the artist reflects on his origins to examine conditions for vitality, justice, and communal solidarity. The work invites audiences to envision new social realities, fostering reflection on energy, labor, community, and ecological justice.

Volume 3, Issue 2 | 2.0 by Kallol Datta abstracts the concept of a garment to investigate how properties of behavioral change inform the patterns, textures, contours, and dimensions of textile objects as the shadows of social fabrics.

A continuation of the artist’s ongoing inquiry into native clothing practices across South-West Asia, North Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Korean Peninsula, this exhibition presents Datta’s signature process of deformation as reformation. This edition emphasizes clothing items donated from Manipur, India, and the Aomori prefecture of Japan. Set against a decaying organic environment, the viewer is prompted to consider what legacy remains when fabrics once meant for wearing become worn; how form informs life, and life informs form.

Have you ever wondered why the faces in old photographs often appear so serious? Limitations of early photography, the weight of the past, or perhaps the secrets held by those once posed? What the Camera Didn’t See blurs the boundaries between photography and painting, creating fantastical responses to vintage photographs from the collection of the Museum of Art & Photography.

Alexander Gorlizki creates elaborate compositions from these historic images, giving them dream-like and whimsical narratives that reanimate and transform portrayals of royalty, common people, architecture, nature, and more. Artists from Pink City Studio in Jaipur, led by master miniature painter Riyaz Uddin, reproduce these new forms, colours, and patterns with immaculate precision using centuries-old techniques of miniature painting. The exhibition challenges traditional ideas of painting and photography, inviting viewers to embrace imaginative interpretations of history rather than literal ones.