High Seas, Open Roads: Journeys that bring us home

Two centuries after the city was sewn together, artists like Saju Kunhan are examining its jagged edges. 'Old Mumbai' is an aching acknowledgment of the injustice and isolation experienced by the millions of hands that keep this island afloat. 

On the other hand, Mayur and Tushar Vayeda’s Our City: Regenerating Hope is an audacious blueprint calling upon us to build again, to build better.

Bruising realism and soaring optimism. You need a little bit of both to make a home here.

Faith is an ancient compass to navigate unknowable worlds. Jain philosophy maps the multiverse onto the body of the ‘Loka Purusha’. Every sphere of existence, from the godly to the earthly to the unholy, is contained within the human form.

Although belonging to a different school of Indian painting, Desmond Lazaro’s art also exists in the realm where human journeys intersect with celestial ones for a brief, radiant moment.

Working in a similar tradition, Jethro Buck recreates the famous 1972 NASA photograph of Earth as seen from a spacecraft on its way to the moon.

Pale Blue Dot is the impassioned plea of an artist urging us to protect this “tiny, fragile jewel floating in the infinite expanse of space”. This luminous blue marble where all our journeys begin and end. This living marvel we call home.

Textiles are the earliest travellers from India, sailing along ancient sea routes. Kolkata-born, London-based artist Sayan Chanda uses them to create tactile sculptures that explore collective memories and mythologies.

The 13th-century Bengali ballad of snake goddess, Manasa, is traditionally told by the travelling Patua artists of northeastern India. Chanda’s Serpent Deity series channels the raw, emotional force of Manasa’s lore, narrated to him by his mother in childhood.

In foreign lands, cultures clash joyously to birth fresh idioms. Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s threshold-dwelling figures, guardians of the crossroads, are the result of these unpredictable collisions.

They reflect the sculptor’s multiple identities as a Sri Lankan-born Australian who grew up navigating Hindu and Catholic traditions at home. He is influenced by a variety of religious and mythological South Asian art, from the Gandharan to Hindu and Buddhist temple sculptures.

We carry our stories wherever we go, wrapped around the silver tongues of our bards. Tholu Bommalata, meaning ‘the dance of the leather dolls’ in Telugu, is shadow puppetry practised by itinerant artists from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

Family troupes, like those of National Award-winning artist Sindhe Chithambara Rao, travel from village to village performing tales from  the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The Vishwaroopa Hanuman depicts the deity in his cosmic form, vast as the universe.

Travel is a leap of faith and sometimes, an act of desperation. Bateau I and II tell of the harrowing journeys made by refugees across the Mediterranean Sea during the European migrant crisis of 2015.

The eyes in the work follow us as we look on and away, precariously adrift in the ocean, and then from the ocean floor.

Witnessing these events from her adopted city of Barcelona, Rithika Merchant conveys the sense of helplessness she felt as the Mediterranean turned into the “sea of the dead”.