Entering All Together Now, an exhibition by a group of artist friends who (peripatetically) live and work in New Delhi, the first person I ran into was my 76-year-old dance teacher. Like many others I would meet that evening, she knew one of the show's artists. The exhibition’s opening evening was an exercise in mapping six degrees of separation—extending the show’s curatorial premise—of a loose network of friends who share a studio and darkroom coming together for a group exhibition – All Together Now.

The exhibition is a record of the artists' friendships, and also of their shared interest in Delhi, a city that lends geographic and emotional resonance to their work. Artist Uzma Mohsin documents a democratic culture of dissent in Songkeepers. In 2018, Mohsin filed an RTI (Right to Information) request to source applications for protests submitted to Delhi’s Parliament Street police station. These were filed by people from across the country who sought the right to protest near central Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, a location that offered public visibility for their causes, with its proximity to government offices, press bureaus and tourist hotspots. It kept humanitarian crises, industrial disasters and miscarriages of justice in the public eye for decades, highlighting their long-term impact on generations of survivors and their families. Mohsin began photographing some of the protestors she met at Jantar Mantar, annotating their images with information she had sourced from her RTI. “The Delhi committee of the Dalit Shoshan Mukti Manch (DSMM) will be organising a candlelight march on 23rd January, to protest the institutional murder of a research scholar of UoH, Rohith Vemula,” a taped layer of text below an image of a young man reads. Mohsin’s annotations record the passing of time through excerpts from the applications, government stamps marking the flow of applications from office to office, and the protestors who bring these abstract pieces of paper to life through their presence at Jantar Mantar.

Another image invites algorithmic crowdsourcing of reactions: a white street-side wall with the word azadi (freedom) emblazoned on it. Here visitors to the exhibition can add to the image, using a thumb signal rubber stamp to leave reactions—two days into the show, I spotted a profusion of thumb-ups, and a few thumbs angled sideways—perhaps gesturing in the general direction of freedom.

On another wall, Ishan Tankha plays with offset printing as he reflects on the pandemic and communal violence in Delhi, focusing on the objects and people he encounters as these events unfold. In an accompanying note, he recalls his path to the neighbourhood store to buy eggs, only to be confronted by “no doubt virus-proof metal gates” which separated him from the throng of migrants, suddenly out of work in a lockdown, now on the long walk back home, to villages and towns hundreds of kilometres away. Tankha’s prints capture the city and its people in transition, on their journeys from one unrelated point to another. Among the photographs, an offset print records impressions of ceiling fans from homes that were ransacked in the northeast Delhi riots of 2020 following the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act in December 2019, their blades warped awkwardly from fire and physical damage. Here, the people have disappeared entirely; their traces lingering in the objects they have left behind.

Kana Kitaoka channels Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of motion to record her engagement with kalaripayattu, a martial art form from Kerala in southern India. A stop-motion study on one wall captures her rendition of animal postures from kalaripayattu: the simhavadivu (lion stance) and gajavadivu (elephant stance), where the performer squats low until their torso is aligned with the floor, settling into a wide stance while preparing for a series of subtle and swift movements. Kitaoka’s showcase includes movement scores in Malayalam (kalaripayattu is often performed to spoken instructions), which are further translated into English and Japanese as she embodies the form.

Shoili Kanungo asks: What does the act of weeding enable, and what does it stop you from noticing? As you make your way across her work, the line between human and plant life begins to blur…

Shoili Kanungo shows a series of drawings on weeding, drawing on her aunt’s preoccupation with ridding her garden of weeds. She asks: What does the act of weeding enable, and what does it stop you from noticing? As you make your way across her work, the line between human and plant life begins to blur; soon weeds spring out of human orifices with a vengeance, growing out of a belly button, or cascading sideways from human ears.

Photographer Srinivas Kuruganti, who is known for his work on health and the environment, shows a series of watercolour portraits. Musician Shyamant Behal annotates scores for Western classical compositions, reflecting on his experience of learning and performing them, sometimes struggling through them.

The artists in All Together Now include Aditya Pande, Avani Tanya, Dhruv Malhotra, Hemant Sareen, Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser), Kaushik Ramaswamy, Pallavi Arora, Rahul Noble Singh, Sarnath Banerjee, Shirley Bhatnagar, Sudeep Chaudhuri and Sukanya Ghosh. The exhibition doubles down on its informality, focusing on the fact of the 20 artists coming together, rather than an outcome-based showcase of their work. Sometimes, this takes what we know of their practice in unexpected directions. The exhibition is made up of the works on view, but it also needs to be deciphered through the conversations and relationships that connect the twenty artists. This evasive (un)familiarity—if you know, you know—underpins the exhibition.

'All Together Now' is on view at IIC Art Gallery from July 26 - August 5, 2024.