New Delhi, October 2026: How does moving at high speed change the way people experience their surroundings? “Mouth Open. No Time to Breathe”, a group exhibition at Thapar Contemporary in New Delhi, tries to capture the relationship between bodily sensation, movement and spatial perception. The show is curated by Jasone Miranda-Bilbao, which brings together eight artists to express – how intense physical experiences can alter our understanding of distance, depth and time.

A Moment Suspended Between Movement and Time

The exhibition perceives its starting point as the brief interval between a skier’s leap into the air and their landing. The moment, physical experience of speed can produce an unexpected shift in perception. Time may seem to slow down, the air can feel almost tangible, and the landscape below may appear flattened. Familiar distinctions between near and far become less certain, suggesting that space is experienced differently depending on how the body moves through it.

Rather than treating this sensation as exclusive to skiing, the exhibition uses it to provoke broader questions about how people perceive their environments. Movement becomes a way to examine the relationship between the body and the world, with physical sensation offering an alternative to understanding distance as a purely measurable quantity.

Eight Artists Explore the Body and Its Surroundings

The Exhibition features eight artists whose works are brought together through a curatorial framework that focuses on the ways movement and bodily experience can reshape perception.

Featured Artists

The exhibition presents a shared inquiry rather than a single narrative about speed. It asks visitors to consider how the experience of moving through space can affect their understanding of familiar surroundings.

Jasone Miranda-Bilbao’s Curatorial Approach

Miranda-Bilbao’s approach centres on how speed changes the act of seeing. In the exhibition statement, she describes the skier’s jump as a moment when time appears to slow and the landscape seems to flatten, making it difficult to distinguish what is close from what is far away.

Miranda is also an artist whose practice spans in different forms, including sculpture, drawing, photography and video. The Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi presented her exhibition Untamed Objects in 2024, bringing together works made between 2012 and 2024.

Thapar Contemporary and Its Exhibition Programme

The exhibition continues Thapar Contemporary’s programme of group presentations that bring different artistic practices into dialogue around a shared question. In 2026, the gallery presented exhibitions including The Engineering of Rubble, co-curated by Miranda-Bilbao and Vaibhav Raj Shah, which featured fragmentation, material and the unfinished.

Ashish Thapar, Director of Thapar Gallery, said the exhibition encourages curiosity and invites visitors to reconsider how they see and experience their surroundings.

What Visitors Can Expect

Rather than presenting movement as an escape from everyday life, the exhibition considers how it can create a different relationship with the world. Its central idea is that the body, air and landscape are not always experienced as separate elements. Under conditions of intense movement, they can seem interconnected, changing the character of familiar spaces.

Key themes explored by the exhibition include:

• Speed and perception: How rapid movement can change the apparent passage of time.
• Bodily sensation: How physical experience shapes the way people understand their surroundings.
• Distance and depth: How the boundaries between near and far can become less distinct.
• Movement and environment: How changing the body’s relationship to a landscape can transform the experience of space.

Exhibition Dates and Visitor Information

Final Thoughts

The exhibition offers an opportunity to consider how movement influences not only physical experience but also perception and interpretation. By bringing eight artists into a shared curatorial framework, it opens a conversation about the body as a means of understanding space, time and the environment. In doing so, it contributes to wider cultural discussions about how contemporary art can make familiar experiences newly visible.

A solo exhibition of ceramic sculptures, stoneware masks, drawings and paintings by 13-year-old artist Rudranil Mitra will be held at the India International Centre Annexe from 15 to 22 November 2026. Curated by Uma Nair, the exhibition explores his distinctive visual language and raises questions about how unconventional talent is recognised and nurtured.

A Solo Exhibition of Imagination and Form

The Imaginarium will present a collection of works by Rudranil Mitra, a young artist whose creative practice spans ceramics, sculpture, drawing and painting. The exhibition will take place at the Basement Gallery, IIC Annexe, New Delhi, with daily visiting hours from 11 am to 7 pm. Through a range of forms and materials, the show brings together images and characters drawn from Mitra’s imagination, including unusual figures, expressive masks and anthropomorphic compositions.

An Artistic Journey That Began in Early Childhood

According to the exhibition organisers, Mitra began drawing and shaping clay at around 18 months of age. He was diagnosed with autism and ADHD and has experienced significant language delays. His family recognised his interest in tactile activities through his early experiments with play dough, arranging objects and creating small forms. These initial explorations gradually developed into more elaborate sculptures featuring multiple limbs, unusual faces and imaginative details.

Recognising his interest in visual and three-dimensional art, his father arranged formal ceramics training with teachers Ambar and Monica Agnihotri. Their approach allowed Mitra considerable freedom to experiment, with technical guidance offered when needed. His father, a landscape architect and sculptor, also documented his artistic development, identifying a body of work with a developing visual vocabulary.

Ceramic Sculptures and Stoneware Masks

The exhibition will include ceramic sculptures, 12 stoneware masks, drawings and paintings. The masks were created during Mitra’s time at the Jaipur studio of ceramic artist and sculptor Keshari Nandan, known as MRID-CERA. His stay there lasted more than three weeks and resulted in a substantial body of stoneware work.

In her curator’s note, Uma Nair describes the sculptures as studies in character, posture and amplified emotion. Figures with multiple heads, hands and eyes evoke mythological imagery, including the contrasting worlds of Devatas and Rakshasas. Their forms combine the familiar with the fantastic, often presenting contradictions and imperfections through exaggerated features.

Mitra’s visual influences also include animated films such as Madagascar, Ice Age, The Bad Guys and Kung-Fu Panda. These references inform his imaginative characters without limiting them to straightforward representations of the films. His sculptural language instead moves between humour, fantasy and the macabre.

Drawings, Paintings and Everyday Objects

Drawing and painting form another part of Mitra’s practice. Nair describes his drawings as single-frame stories, with each image communicating an idea through a concentrated visual gesture. His paintings, including works made while travelling, reflect an interest in colour, observation and the reinterpretation of familiar subjects.

The exhibition also draws attention to his experiments with everyday materials. Paintings on empty glass bottles and birds constructed from pencil shavings demonstrate his interest in transforming commonplace objects into works of art. These pieces extend the exhibition’s focus beyond conventional sculpture, showing how creative possibilities can emerge from materials often overlooked in daily life.

A Wider Conversation About Education and Talent

Beyond presenting an individual artistic journey, The Imaginarium has an educational and social dimension. The exhibition’s accompanying statement highlights how children who struggle within conventional academic systems may possess abilities that are not adequately recognised through standard measures of achievement.

Mitra, who attends Don Bosco School and has reached Grade 8, reportedly finds mathematics and art more accessible and engaging than many other school subjects. His experience informs the exhibition’s broader question: how can families, schools and communities create opportunities for children whose strengths do not always align with traditional expectations?

Rather than treating academic performance as the sole measure of potential, the exhibition invites visitors to consider the importance of individual interests, creative expression and appropriate support.

Exhibition Details and Visitor Information

Takeaway

By bringing together Mitra’s experiments across clay, drawing, painting and found materials, the exhibition offers an opportunity to encounter a young artist’s developing visual world while considering how creative abilities can be supported beyond the classroom. It also opens a wider conversation about inclusion, education and the many forms in which artistic potential can emerge.

Photographer, novelist and publisher Ananth Padmanabhan will present No Refusal, a photography exhibition exploring Calcutta’s streets, changing urban landscape and collective memory, at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, from 4–10 November 2026. Bringing together photographs made over several years, the exhibition focuses on the city’s everyday visual identity, particularly its gradually disappearing yellow Ambassador taxis.

A Personal Connection with Calcutta

Padmanabhan’s relationship with Calcutta began in January 1998, when he arrived from Delhi aboard the Rajdhani Express and stepped into the bustle of Howrah. That initial encounter developed into a sustained photographic engagement with the city, its streets and its changing character. Through images made across different periods, he has documented the relationship between urban development, decay and the rhythms of everyday life.

The exhibition continues a photographic exploration that began with his first solo show, Calcutta: Walking in the City, presented at the India Habitat Centre in 2012. The earlier exhibition established his interest in observing the city through images, providing a background to the concerns explored in No Refusal.

The Ambassador Taxi as a Cultural Marker

At the centre of No Refusal is the Ambassador taxi, once a familiar presence on Calcutta’s streets. For Padmanabhan, the vehicle became both a recurring photographic subject and a personal point of connection with the city. Its recognisable shape and yellow exterior made it part of the everyday landscape, linking individual journeys with the wider experiences of generations of residents and visitors.

The exhibition’s title refers to a government directive intended to prevent taxi drivers from refusing passengers. The phrase subsequently became associated with the city’s yellow taxis and their place in its visual identity. According to the exhibition press release, the Ambassador was first manufactured in 1958 at a factory near Calcutta. Originally painted black and yellow, the taxis transitioned to an all-yellow appearance in the mid-1990s.

Documenting a Disappearing Streetscape

The gradual disappearance of these vehicles provides the exhibition with its central subject. Production of the Ambassador ended in 2014, and the cars have become less visible on Calcutta’s roads. The growth of app-based transport has also placed pressure on traditional owner-drivers, while the remaining taxis face an uncertain future.

Padmanabhan’s photographs record this transition, including images of a garage where ageing vehicles are taken for scrapping. Rather than treating the taxis solely as objects of nostalgia, the exhibition considers what their disappearance reveals about the changing city and the ways people relate to familiar surroundings.

Key themes explored in the exhibition include:

• Urban change: The evolving streetscape and the relationship between development and decay.
• Collective memory: The role of everyday objects in preserving shared experiences.
• Belonging: The connection between the photographer, the city and its familiar sights.
• Impermanence: The gradual disappearance of a recognisable feature of Calcutta’s cultural landscape.

Ananth Padmanabhan’s Photography Practice

Alongside his photographic work, Padmanabhan has built a career in publishing and writing. Born in Madras, he began his professional career at Landmark Bookstore and has worked in the publishing industry for three decades. He is currently the Chief Executive Officer of HarperCollins, according to the supplied exhibition biography.

His earlier photographic work includes images of Ladakh featured in NDTV’s SOS Ladakh Project and the Religare Arts Initiative Exhibition in 2010. His first solo photography exhibition, Calcutta: Walking in the City, followed in 2012. In 2014, his debut novel, Play with Me, became a bestseller, further reflecting his work across different creative fields.

More information about the photographer is available on his official website.

Exhibition at India Habitat Centre

No Refusal will be presented at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, on Lodhi Road in New Delhi. The gallery hosts exhibitions across visual art and other creative disciplines, providing a setting for the presentation of contemporary artistic practices. Its programme includes both two-dimensional and three-dimensional works, according to the institution’s official website.

Preserving the Everyday Life of a City

Through No Refusal, Padmanabhan turns attention to a familiar part of Calcutta’s streetscape to examine broader questions of urban identity, memory and change. The photographs invite viewers to consider how ordinary objects acquire cultural significance through repeated encounters and shared experience. As the city evolves, the exhibition offers a photographic record of a disappearing landmark and a reflection on the connections between place, personal history and collective memory.