At the entrance to Sakshi Gallery's 40th anniversary exhibition in Delhi, visitors are met not by a neutral prelude but by a house from Kashmir that appears to have survived a blast. In Veer Munshi's Echoes Without Borders, the familiar shape of home is interrupted by shrapnel, skulls and fragments, while mirrors multiply the image of destruction around it. The work sets the tone for Of Being and Becoming, an exhibition that is less a retrospective of a gallery's history than a meditation on how Indian contemporary art has changed its language over four decades.
Installed at Travancore Palace, the show brings together 46 artists across generations, including Vivan Sundaram, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Nalini Malani, Rekha Rodwittiya, KG Subramanyan, Navjot Altaf, Shilpa Gupta, Thukral and Tagra and others. Paintings, sculpture, video, installation and projection are arranged across three sections that span the late 1980s to the present, creating a conversation between older and newer works rather than a simple chronology of names and dates.
Curator Manan Shah said the exhibition was shaped by Sakshi's archive, which contains more than 600 exhibitions, but he deliberately narrowed the selection to fit a larger argument about artistic change. "When I was looking at the archive of Sakshi, they had done over 600 exhibitions," he said. "Some of them were exceptional names to include. But I excluded them either due to space constraints or simply because they did not align with the premise of the show."
That premise is the changing visual grammar of the last four decades. Shah is not merely suggesting that Indian art has become more political, more conceptual or more experimental. Instead, he wants the works themselves to show how those shifts emerged, and how historical events altered the way artists looked, represented and withheld meaning.
The exhibition is structured like a theatre production, divided into three scenes: the late 1980s to 1999, the early 2000s to 2014, and 2014 to the present. The first section captures a period when many artists were moving away from formal conventions toward more narrative, conceptual and socially engaged practices. Shah points to two events as especially consequential: the economic reforms of 1991 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Together, he argues, they changed the social and political landscape and, with it, the concerns and visual strategies of artists.
Works by Vivan Sundaram, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and others reflect that transition. In Rekha Rodwittiya's In Search of My Mother's Garden, personal memory becomes a route into a wider feminist vocabulary. The image of a grown woman within another woman's womb draws on Rodwittiya's childhood memories of listening to her mother recount stories at their ancestral home, turning intimate recollection into a broader reflection on inheritance, identity and female experience.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Shah identifies another shift, one he calls "political minimalism." Political concerns remain central, but they increasingly arrive through fragments, satire and metaphor rather than direct representation. The change is visible in works that ask viewers to decode rather than simply absorb meaning, and to recognise that the political can be embedded in form as much as in subject matter.
That tendency becomes even more pronounced in the later galleries. A sculpture by Sunil Gawde that first appears to be a floral garland reveals itself to be made of blades, turning a symbol of celebration into an object of threat. The viewer is repeatedly asked to look again, and to question the evidence of the eye. Shah sees this movement toward indirectness as one of the defining changes in contemporary visual practice, especially after 2014, when concerns around surveillance, censorship and the instability of public discourse have become harder to ignore.
The exhibition's power lies in the way it stages these shifts without flattening them into a single story of progress. Instead, it suggests that Indian contemporary art has been shaped by a series of ruptures: economic liberalisation, communal violence, feminist interventions, new media, and the increasingly fraught conditions of the present. The result is a show that feels both historical and immediate, one that uses the gallery's own four-decade journey to ask what Indian art has become, and what it has had to become, in order to speak to its time.