Doug Aitken’s Debut in India

The Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in Mumbai is hosting a landmark exhibition, “Under The Sun.” This is the first-ever showcase of the internationally renowned American artist and filmmaker Doug Aitken in India. The Triadic (partners Roya Sachs, Mafalda Kahane, and Elizabeth Edelman) tailors the exhibition and is on show at the Art House, NMACC. This grand exhibition is on view from December 6, 2025, to February 22, 2026. It unfolds as a mesmerizing engagement that transcends time and speculates on the future.  The exposition is conscientiously placed at the juncture of cinema, sculpture, architecture, sound, and light, challenging the traditional modes of displaying art. Aitken describes this event as “a kind of modern mythology.” 

The calibration of this event is colossal. The displayed artefacts are the result of a biennium and a half of coordination across continents and 5 time zones. Each piece, thus, taps into immense philosophical value. Aitken’s work is highly focused on hyper-connectivity, modern isolation, and the evolving relationship between the “natural” and the “virtual.” In Isha Ambani’s words, this exhibition orients itself to NMACC’s aim “to foster global artistic exchange.” This ongoing display is an important link between Indian and Western cultures. 

A Contemporary Mythology in Motion

“Under The Sun” is a synchronized view of sculptures, films, and illuminated installations that form the basics of Aitken’s practice. Spread across three floors, the artworks appear sleek and tech-driven from afar; upon closer look, they unveil a highly embodied experience. Aitken’s artefacts move, reflect, and offer a dense sensory disorientation. His key areas of interest lie in the inquiry into how people navigate their individuality amidst a media-saturated environment. This notion gets a boost in the Indian soil, as it is known to coalesce tradition and futurity, coexisting. 

A striking feature of the exhibition is the development of specific artworks in collaboration with Indian artists over two years. A beautiful amalgamation is framed using locally sourced materials and Aitken’s global vision. 

Key works include NEW ERA (2018), presented as a video installation, and LIGHTFALL / OTHER WORLDS (2025). These installations absorb the viewer into their frame and blur the lines between the observer and the artwork. “Light” is a recurring motif in his art, presented both as a physical entity and a metaphor. Light is the most essential thread that links the exhibits, symbolizing the succession of collapse, renewal, and transformation. Aitken’s art resonates with the post-medium practice and experiential art that have shaped global contemporary art since the late twentieth century. Hitherto, his artworks were discussed in relation to artists like Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell. 

A Journey Through Time, Material, and Light

The First floor is transformed into a landscape of handcrafted artefacts encompassing Indian craft traditions with global elements. The materials include raw logs, debris, stained glass, and woven textiles. A colossal sculpture of human figures created through robotic milling and hand-finishing stands tall at its heart. Six textiles embroidered by Mumbai-based Milaaya Embroidery House for 600+ hours surround the human figures.  These textiles represent India’s sacred rivers as veins across hands.

The Second floor metamorphoses into a kaleidoscopic environment with Aitken’s video installation, NEW ERA (2018). The chamber is adorned with mirroring walls and shifting scenes. The film features Martin Cooper, the inventor of the mobile phone. This display aims to convey the evolving relationship of humans and nature amidst the hyper-digital age. It also showcases the tension between global connection and personal isolation. The mirrored architecture fragments the viewer, making them a part of the accelerated, reflective circuits of the image machine.

The Third floor is the final culmination presented through LIGHTFALL/ OTHER WORLDS. This installation is utterly luminous with hundreds of suspended LED tubes adorning it. It represents something booming. It states the fact that both an atom and an AI consciousness are flickers of life. Both of them are considered pure energy in motion that alters the modes of perception. 

The Exhibition At a Glance

Key Highlights

• First-ever solo exhibition of Doug Aitken in India
  
• Three-floor immersive installation integrating film, light, and sculpture
• The linear journey across Past, Present, and Future provides a rare structure that frames the individual art pieces within a larger, philosophical ‘novel’ on human existence and time
  
• New commissions developed with Indian artisans using local materials
  
• This conscious choice by Aitken ensures the work avoids “awkward colonisation,” weaving local craft into a global vision
  
• Major works including NEW ERA and LIGHTFALL / OTHER WORLDS
• The use of the mobile phone’s inventor in NEW ERA grounds the abstract concepts of technology and connectivity in a tangible human story, enhancing the work’s emotional resonance
  
• Curatorial focus on time, mythology, and sensory experience
  
• Strong alignment with global new media and experiential art practices
  

Takeaway

Under the Sun is a beautifully sequentialized encounter that demands time and attention. It is a pivotal show for both NMACC and Mumbai. It is not only a masterful display of a plethora of themes, but with every passing artefact or visual representation, the exhibits turn highly emotionally resonant. Most interestingly, Aitken’s use of light and mirrored environments serves a higher purpose. He employs these media to reflect on the viewer. 

 

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Moreover, the significance of this exhibition lies in the localization of source materials.  By doing so, it committed to Indian craftsmanship. It elevated the local materials to a global platform and made it worthy of an international showcase. It suggests that it is possible to imagine the future even while staying rooted in one’s tradition. Judging on a prudential scale, this exhibition has set a benchmark for future large-scale exhibitions in India. 

This show is a must-see, not just for art enthusiasts, but for anyone seeking a refuge space to process the hyper-speed reality of modern life in a city like Mumbai.

A Quick Glimpse Into The Exhibition

Portraiture as a genre has existed in history for a very long time. It grew in demand, especially within the urban centres where diverse social groups interacted. The human appearance has long served as the reflector of history. It apprehends the wavering ebb and flow of power, society, and identity. This persistent gesture is the central focus of DAG’s upcoming exhibition called “Face to Face: A Portrait of a City.” The exhibition will open in Mumbai at the DAG Gallery 1, The Taj Mahal Palace, Apollo Bunder, Mumbai, from January 8 to January 11, 2026. The thematic core of the exhibition revolves around tracing the portraiture of the city, its people, and history in the colonial and post-colonial era. The exhibition aims to trace the evolution of Bombay as a ‘heterogametic city,’ infiltrating through the narratives of social, cultural, and political spheres that have shaped the identity of the city. 

The Colonial Canvas: Academic Realism and the Bombay School

The orbit of Portraiture in Western India is rudimentarily entangled with the establishment of British academic institutions. The establishment of the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay was a watershed moment in introducing the principles of European naturalism and academic realism to Indian artists. Hitherto, the visual representations drew inspiration from the Indian miniature or company school conventions. The proper academic conduct was instituted through the newly introduced curriculum that stressed anatomical precision and the Western technique of modelling (using light and shadow). This fundamentally changed how humans were drawn. 

Early works at the beginning of colonial contexts were mostly commissioned under the patronage of local rulers and wealthy patrons. There were artists like Frank Brooks who produced the portraits of regional royals using European techniques. However, the prime chapter of development in the niche of paintings began with figures like M.V. Dhurandhar, M.F. Pithawalla, and D.C. Joglekar, who became instrumental in transforming portraiture into a tool used for chronicling indigenous life.  These charismatic Indian painters absorbed the colonial art and percolated it into Bombay’s own identity. 

Later, the genre expanded and entailed people from a more diverse social strata. This included lay communities, shifting the focus of art from the elite to the broader social bases, sometimes including the subalterns. The portraits, therefore, began to capture collective memory. Hitherto, DAG’s initiatives, such as Indian Portraits: The Face of a People, show similar commitments to understanding how visual culture mediates collective identity and memory. 

M.V. Dhurandhar: The City’s Foremost Chronicler

 

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Among the most significant figures who will be featured in the exhibition, Rao Bahadur Mahadev Vishwanath Dhurandhar occupies a distinct spot. As a product of the J.J. School, he executed the fusion of Western techniques with Indian subjects. In his career, he also rose to the position of becoming the first Indian Director of the J.J. School. His core orientation lies in European realism, but the subjectivity of his paintings revolved around his immediate surroundings in Bombay.

Dhurandhar left thousands of paintings, illustrations, and popular lithographs that reached the masses through postcards and calendars. His work oscillated between Indian mythological themes, such as Radha and Krishna, to historical depictions, and representations of contemporary life. He also bagged the patronage from the affluent Parsi community in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bombay. In 1928, Dhurandhar created illustrations for a Parsi Sanad (charter), depicting Parsi religious architectural features and community members in their daily life. He also received patronage from the Pathare Prabhu community to which he belonged. 

Dhurandhar was contemporaneous with Raja Ravi Verma, but unlike him, Dhurandhar’s subjects, particularly his women, possessed a distinctive sense of tangible realism that felt closer to life. 

The Exhibition At a Glance

Key Highlights

• The exhibition traces how portraiture in Bombay developed from European-influenced academic realism to nuanced representations by Indian artists trained in colonial institutions.
  
• It highlights the mastery of academic realism by the Bombay School artists, a movement often sidelined by the narrative of early modern Indian art.
  
• Portraits of local royalty, influential communities and everyday citizens are curated to reflect Bombay’s layered civic identity, shaped by empire, migration, commerce and cosmopolitan interactions.
  
• The exhibition brings together works across a broad time span and diverse artistic voices, from early colonial painters like Frank Brooks to local artists whose styles engaged both indigenous and Western visual vocabularies.
  
• Central artists include M.V. Dhurandhar, whose prolific output provided an unparalleled documentation of the city’s populace.
  
• By positioning faces, both of elites and ordinary citizens, as visual archives, the show situates portraiture as a mode of historical documentation rather than mere artistic production. 
  
• The featured portraits act as a “collective memory” of the city, reflecting the layered identities of a restless, pluralistic metropolis.

Portraiture as a Socio-Political Document

The exhibition places these portraits in the utilitarian purview of socio-political documents. Each canvas denotes the social hierarchies through attire, posture, and background. The portrait of a Parsi businessman, for instance, speaks volumes about the community’s wealth and influence in commerce, just as a depiction of a daily life scene chronicles vanishing customs.

Today, urban spaces are reimagined in a plethora of ways, and amidst this, the classic portraits of these Indian masters offer a unique visual vocabulary through which the imagination of the cityscape broadens. The exhibition is an open invitation to people to reconsider how arts and visual histories shape the picturization of a particular thing, and in turn are shaped by civic memory.