Maithili Chaturvedi
Lovefool, 2026
Oil on velvet
35h x 50w in
We are always already looking.
Not just at images, but through them—past them, around them, into the next thing. Vision slips easily into habit. Attention, less so. It strains, flickers, lingers, fragments. It is not a given; it is a negotiation.
Shape of Attention begins from this instability. Attention is not neutral—it is trained, extracted, rewarded, withheld. It circulates as currency, is measured as value, and increasingly, is engineered. To attend is to participate in an economy that both exceeds and inhabits us.
The works gathered here do not settle into a single rhythm of viewing. In the practices of Maithli Chaturvedi, Abhimanue Govindan, Chaturika Jayani, Shivangi Kalra, Ashna Malik, Harsh Nambiar, Gayan Prageeth, Aditya Puthur, Arinjoy Sen and Smitha Shajith, attention becomes both method and subject.
Shivangi Kalra
You're Next, 2025
Oil on canvas
53h x 69w in
Chaturvedi, Kalra, and Shajith each engage the theatrical from distinct socio-cultural vantage points. Chaturvedi draws directly from cinema, exploring a reversal of the gendered gaze through her treatment of female subjects. Kalra, by contrast, turns inward, constructing surreal, intimate domestic scenes that evoke psychological landscapes through swift, almost operatic gestures. Meanwhile, Smitha Shajith, both painter and performance artist, stages communal scenes in which figures appear to move in self-contained rhythms. Her delicate watercolors, with their varied forms and meandering borders, embody movement and theatricality in themselves. Together, their practices command and use attention in different ways: at times through seduction and curiosity, at others through an evocation of collectivity.
Abhimanue Govindan
Untitled, 2023
Pigments with casein on rice paper
39h x 26w in
Govindan and Jayani explore the architectural realm: one through abstraction and another through figuration, both through structure and sensibility, each probing how space is constructed, inhabited, and perceived. Govindan’s works often suggest built environments in flux—fragmented, layered, and shifting—where architectural forms become unstable frameworks for viewing. Jayani, in contrast, engages the conditions of architecture - industrial and personal and how they affect one another.
Harsh Nambiar
Floss Cradle, 2026
Oil on canvas
54h x 72w in
Ashna Malik and Harsh Nambiar engage attention through formally distinct approaches, each foregrounding the act of looking as both intimate and constructed. Malik’s practice lingers on surface and detail, where textures, repetitions, and subtle shifts in form reward a close and instinctual gaze, one driven by feeling beyond just knowledge.
Nambiar, by contrast, builds dense visual fields where figuration and abstraction collide—his compositions often feel compressed, charged with competing gestures and references that demand to be navigated rather than passively received. Together, their works articulate attention as something both absorbed and contested: at once drawn inward through quiet accumulation and dispersed across restless, image-saturated planes.
Gayan Parageeth
Conceal, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
43.31h x 33.46w in
Aditya Puthur and Gayan Prageeth both work within a mode of dreamlike figuration, yet diverge in how that sensibility is spatialized. Puthur’s compositions often shock and alert the viewer: his figures are jarringly present yet not fully there, creating a haunting. The psychological charge is immediate and longstanding. Prageeth on the other hand invites a meditative gaze, one that loses itself in the natural beauty of his landscape-oriented environments. They articulate two registers of the dreamlike: one dispersed across space, the other anchored in the body.
Arinjoy Sen
Tale of Manasa, 2025
Printed and Embroidered Silk
60h x 37.01w in
Arinjoy Sen’s Tale of Manasa extends beyond myth into a meditation on migration and displacement, where the narrative of the serpent goddess becomes entangled with contemporary experiences of movement across geographies. He digitally draws the stories which are then printed on silk and kantha embroidered by SHE Kantha, a women’s led NGO focused towards the revival of kantha.
Figures, motifs, and gestures appear to emerge and recede, resisting linear narration and instead inviting a cyclical, attentive mode of viewing. In this work, attention moves between detail and totality, mirroring the way oral and visual traditions carry and transform stories over time.
Within the show, perception extends across different temporalities: a slow accrual, a sudden insistence, a quiet persistence that resists immediate capture. Some works invite a durational gaze, others interrupt it. Some ask to be held; others refuse to be fully grasped. Together, they outline attention not as a fixed capacity, but as something elastic—pressured, redirected, and unevenly distributed.
It appears as labour, as care, as distraction, as excess. It accumulates in detail, disperses in gesture, and sometimes withdraws altogether. The viewer is not positioned outside this field, but implicated within it—pulled into circuits of noticing, skimming, returning.
What, then, does it mean to look closely now? What forms of attention are cultivated, and which are eroded? What remains unseen, not because it is hidden, but because it is unprofitable to notice?
Rather than offering resolution, the exhibition holds open these tensions. It asks not only how we look, but how we are made to look—and what it might take to reconfigure that act.
Manya Kochhar