The ongoing exhibition at Avtar Foundation for Arts hits home. Sometimes you are gazing at someone else’s home, sometimes you are right in the middle of their living room quietly taking in the surroundings, sometimes you are standing in front of barbed wires dividing two countries and perhaps dividing homes too.
At Home — an exploration of space, belonging, identity, and memory, curated by Shruti Parthasarathy, marks a significant beginning for exhibiting modern and contemporary art in Chennai, within the foundation’s new permanent space in MRC Nagar, RA Puram.
“The foundation’s primary purpose is to address the lack of public or private institutions in Chennai that showcase contemporary and modern South Asia art to the Public. It aims to bridge the gap in access to information about the current developments in the South Asian art scene, both in modern and contemporary art,” says Jaiveer Johal, collector and founder of Avtar Foundation for Arts.
The exhibition showcases the works of seminal artists like VS Gaitonde, Zarina Hashmi, and explores contemporary art through the works of Shilpa Gupta, Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai, Baaraan Ijlal.
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The exhibition delves into the idea of what home really means — whether it is a physical structure or lived space, as a marker of a cultural identity, or as a memory of a space lost to time, displacement or longing. “The idea is to have different connotations of home, home as a shelter or refuge, and what it means to different people.,” says Shruti.
Spanning the works of seminal artists like VS Gaitonde, Zarina and exploring contemporary art through the works of Shilpa Gupta, Arshi Irshad Ahmadzai, Baaraan Ijlal, and many others, the exhibit begins with the concept of home, starting with a concrete, architectural exploration of space, line, and volume in built houses, and progressing to a more abstract understanding of home.
There is artist Ayushi Anil Panchal’s Inside Story II, 2023, featuring a zinc plate, two fans are depicted on the plate, representing the memory of using a fan to cool down upon returning home in the heat. The plate with its minute carvings shows a cramped but beloved space, something that represents the home she grew up in.
Cityscape
There is VS Gaitonde’s abstract piece, titled Untitled (Cityscape)-1971, a depiction of the Bombay skyline. “Gaitonde’s large watercolour wash is from a brief, lesser-known phase just before he moved to the large monochrome oils often ascribed to his deep interest in Zen Buddhism. The forms in this work suggest a built city skyline of Bombay where he lived then, but very atmospheric, suggesting sky and sea green water and has the same air of tranquillity and stillness of the oils,” describes Shruti.
Artist Zarina’s series, By The Mango Tree-1988, depicts a ripe mango seed in different ways, perhaps a portrayal of the artist’s mango tree in her courtyard. “Here, Homer resides only in memory; it’s about longing and loss of the childhood home. In her body of work home is a recurrent theme,’’ says Shruti.
Shilpa Gupta’s, 100 Handdrawn Maps of India (2019) invited gallery visitors to draw maps of India, which were then layered to demonstrate that no single map is definitive, and that the borders are imaginary not fixed.
The show is open to all from Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm, until October 10, at No. 57, 3rd floor, Satyadev Avenue, MRC Nagar, Raja Annamalai Puram, Chennai.
Published – August 26, 2025 01:08 pm IST
