Founded with the goal of spotlighting contemporary art from South Asia, the art gallery Muziris Contemporary in Mumbai opened its doors to the public earlier this month, with its inaugural exhibition Memory Palace. Curator Ayaz Basrai, an Indian architect and spatial researcher spoke to STIR about the exhibition, “The theme emerged from this beautiful construct in ancient Roman society, from their incredibly symbiotic relationship between art, architecture and neuroscience. It refers to the ancient mnemonic practice of mentally mapping complex narratives onto familiar architecture, and then being able to conjure up the narrative structure at will by walking through this neural architecture. All the works in the show explore deep, poignant themes of nostalgia, ideas of the homestead, dreams and hallucinations, city love and personal portraits of walks and observations.”

This focus on architecture and its mental and emotional associations is fitting for the gallery, which is located in the historic Arsiwala Mansion and named after the ancient port city of Muziris—a hub for trading spices, precious metals, ivory and ideas that thrived on Kerala’s Malabar coast around the 1st century BCE. Gallery owner Joe Cyril, part of the founding team of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, sees the space as an opportunity to put the two port cities, their cultures and artwork into a syncretic conversation. The exhibition thinks through ideas of rootedness, change, migration and exchange that are integral to the unique cultural identities of Mumbai and Muziris. The show features eight Indian artists exploring these themes, with artworks that move from recollections of hometown memories to larger-than-life cityscapes and imaginary structures. The result is a series of ‘subjective maps’ created by plotting the ephemeral onto a physical space and exploring the psychological significance of built environments.

All the works in the show explore deep, poignant themes of nostalgia, ideas of the homestead, dreams and hallucinations, city love and personal portraits of walks and observations. – Ayaz Basrai

Entering the gallery, one sees a series of small, quiet paintings by self-taught Indian artist Santhi E.N. She paints the coconut trees, farms, houses and people of her ancestral home in Thrissur, Kerala, from memory. Her style recalls storybook illustrations and childhood recollections—the human figures have the barest suggestion of facial features but are expressive in their body language and mood, while the detailed trees and thatched roofs fade as the scene recedes into the horizon. Dull purple dominates her colour palette and conveys a feeling of longing and melancholy, marked by the transformations and losses of the modern industrial age and the universal theme of yearning for a childhood to which one can never return. Discussing the challenge of uniting such deeply personal works under one roof, Basrai said, “Strangely enough, when something is so personal and extremely individualistic, it also tends to resonate across diverse audiences. We all feel a strong mirrored reaction with someone else's deeply expressed emotions and this is the core of what makes us humans.”

Across the room are the works of multimedia artist Kapil Jangid, who creates tableaus that toe the line between sculpture and collage using recovered concrete, wood and found objects. The selection of these various materials and their assemblage is a nod to his migratory upbringing in rural Vadodara, Gujarat. Using clean lines and earth tones, he depicts the hallways, stairs, foyers, windows, etc. of rooms imagined and remembered. Jangid’s practice centres around urbanisation, migration and stratification. His compositions, although they are uninhabited by humans, attempt to understand the sociopolitical realities of people through the spaces they inhabit and construct. Contemporary artist Nandita Mukand also creates multimedia art with found materials, making sinuous, organic forms with commonplace urban objects like medical gauze, cement, resin and wire. Her sculptural paintings, like Other Worlds, Another's World (2024) from the Unravelling Worlds series, are defined by this internal juxtaposition.

Indian designer Tulika Shrivastava, based in New Delhi, also works from a similar impulse to document and preserve. She photographs the exteriors of ordinary Indian houses, slices the images and weaves them with bright paper to recreate patterns seen in the metal windows and gate grilles. Shrivastava translates unnoticed elements of traditional craft in everyday life into contemporary art that recalls pixel art or bitmaps. She is inspired by the unexpected intersection of the analogue and technological in ‘pseudo-digital’ art forms like mosaic, needlepoint and, in this series, metalwork grilles. Mumbai-based photographer Kuber Shah captures the soul of the city’s Art Deco past by documenting the remnants of architecture and design from the period. His black and white images zoom into theatres and homes, defamiliarising them while centring on iconic elements of the modernist style.

Another artwork with art deco influences is from the Urban Forest series (2025) by the Vayeda brothers, Mayur and Tushar. The large painting is crammed with buildings that only seem to multiply, the longer one looks. A cacophony of architectural styles flows into each other—contemporary skyscrapers rub shoulders with vintage facades, fantastical structures, European steeples and Islamic domes. The Vayeda brothers, who are from the Warli community, use traditional methods to create a contemporary take on Warli art—an artistic tradition indigenous to Maharashtra. While the characteristic line work is recognisable, the circles and swirls typical of the style are flattened to form the crowded cityscape. The collision of folk art practice and the city in their Urban Forest series is a commentary on rapid urbanisation in India and its encroachment into human life.

The show also features veteran artist N. N. Rimzon from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Although known primarily for sculpture, the red and white acrylic painting House Under the Clouds (2008) is a continuation of his preoccupation with objects and their relationship with memory and mythology—both personal and collective. The residential building is pulled into the realm of the fantastical by the eerie colours and the ghostly ‘cloud’ that looms above. In a more abstract manner, Ahmedabad and Mumbai-based artist Harsimran Juneja deals with similar themes using a monochromatic colour palette. Yellow, which, to Juneja, is the colour bridging hope and despair, is used to render spaces in a style inspired by Neo-expressionism and graffiti. These settings are inscribed with text, blurring narrative and visual art to create a feeling of disillusionment.

Under the restored teak beams at Muziris Contemporary, the gathering of artists, styles and mediums creates an exhibition seemingly full of pocket dimensions—new locales to immerse oneself in, each conforming to unique and deeply personal laws, moods and forms. Memory Palace is in equal parts a documentary, a love letter and a critique of the spaces and forms that shape individual and collective memory and history.

‘Memory Palace’ will be on view at Muziris Contemporary in Mumbai, India, until September 15, 2025.