shruti ramlingaiah

Shruti Ramlingaiah is a curator and researcher based in Mumbai. Her curatorial and writing practice emphasises smell and sound, body and memory with a focus on movement, mobility and (non)human enquiries. Her selected texts, exhibition essays, and poems can be read here.

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This exhibition essay, ‘Riddles of the Wor(l)d’ works by Pooja Shah for the Akara Contemporary in Mumbai

July, 2025

Akara Art

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Participating artists: Gayatri Acharjee Halder, Jyothiraj Mayampilly, Meghna Singh Patpatia, Rashmimala, Sajith CN, Sudhayadas S, Veda Thozhur Kolleri

Presented by: Gallery Dotwalk, Delhi NCR

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Hybrid Date Palm Competing with Its Natural Cousin

I have traced it with my eyes more than once—counting is tricky, but I practice this often in a new place. It helps fix a landmark in cities that otherwise blur into grid-like layouts, where corners look alike. A landmark need not always be a monument, though; sometimes it is something stranger that sticks in the mind. Every day on the bus to the studio, I confront this tall telecommunication tower—eerily clad in a timeless date palm. One has to look up to see it. Symbolic, it tames and alleviates—a gesture wrapped in connecting attire, navigational somewhat decorative, carrying cultural connotations and biome tensions. It wears a distinct aesthetics woven into the landscaping, its subtly artificial appearance blending into urban context.

After circling the city time and again, I realise how difficult it can be to actually spot it. Taller than its natural cousin with greyish-white, greenish-blue leaves, this version stands out in its greenness, with a mobile service provider’s logo planted at its feet. In the urban landscape, aerial views emphasises road pushing through space, land rearranged to mimic capitalist ideals. The palm-tower fits neatly into this picture, its upscale appearance punctuated by an antenna reaching toward the sky.

And yet —what does “green” really mean here? The natural date palm radiates freshness, while the idea of growth itself seems bound up in how green it appears. This hybrid version, though, wears a timeless disguise. Simply appearing lush does not guarantee presence or endurance.

Dates themselves remind me of this paradox. The fruit, when freshly plucked, sits between sweet and bitter, ripening into a richer sweetness as it dries. I recently came across a food history essay on delicacies like ma'amoul—date-filled cookies, known by various names across this region. Traditionally, treats bound to traditions of home, family and gathering. By contrast, the giant palm-tower mirrors a city’s expansion, embodying an infrastructural vision of interconnected networks.

Walter Benjamin once noted: “The power of country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by aeroplane.” I am reminded of  Christopher Joshua Benton's My Plant Immigrants—a suspended Mejdoul date palm, chained by its neck, imagine an upside-down chandelier forced into a massive concrete crate. Held within a defining polished room embodies uprooted imagery. The work stages displacement, questioning migration, labour economies, and identity politics—difficult terms, but urgent ones. Where do palms belong in everyday life? Beyond the supermarket shelf or the nutritional facts check-list, they carry histories of labour, circulation and more so the farmers who harvest and water these trees. Benton’s work makes visible the paths by which fruit reaches millions.

The story of palms draws to a story of connection —whether through a hybrid tower masquerading as nature, or through the sweetness of ma’amoul. Between the spectacle of urban symbols and the intimacy of shared food lies a ghosted history of belonging, waiting to be traced anew.

Credits

Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State by Gareth Doherty, University of California Press, 2017

“Maamoul: An Ancient Cookie That Ushers In Easter And Eid In The Middle East” by Emy E. Robertson, The Salt, NPR.org, April 2017

The World Was My Garden by Christopher Joshua Benton — christopherbenton.com

© Shruti Ramlingaiah, 2024

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The Unsettling of Ordinary

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Mūḷ Māthī // from the roots: A Keen Postscript

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Echoes

APRE Art House, Mumbai 2022

curated at the APRE in Colaba this was a three-artist exhibition that ran from 4 - 29 November 2022.

An echo is a soundwave that is reflected off a distant surface resonating between different places and times; three artists with differing outlooks and generational affiliations, each setting their distinct approaches to language and individual sensibilities come in dialogue and opposition.

It asks us to contemplate if life is part of a landscape or does life always appears landscape-like.

Featured works by: Pallav Chander, Dhiraj Pednekar, Pavan Kavitkar

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Of Separation and Belonging: Sayed Haider Raza

Exhibition review of Zamin: Homelands’, “Of Separation and Belonging: Sayed Haider Raza”, TAKE on Art. Books, Memory Issue 28, 2022

‘Zamin: Homelands’ at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF), Mumbai celebrates the birth anniversary of Sayed Haider Raza and the centenary year of the CSMVS (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya) museum that timely coincides with seventy fve years of the country’s independence. It is now more than ever that in the times of mass displacement and migratory movements the question of home or pluralities of co-existence needs to be reconsidered. In this advanced globalised world with ease of travel, cheap airlines, constant travel and issues of homelessness there is a constant strife to come to terms with one’s identity. The show compels us to recall the timelines of our history that draw trajectories to artist’s life and happenings, and social realities of the times. It also makes us think of separation and belonging in a sensitive new era of the aftereffects of partitions. With a few works from the museum, other collections in the city, and archival material from the Raza Foundation the show is curated by Puja Vaish, Director of the JNAF, and ran from 2 June–31 July 2022. The show incorporates texts that are informative, touching anecdotes using letters— written and received—and notes written in Devanagari, French, and English tell of the artist’s assimilation of languages, and varied knowledge of art, literature, poetry and cultures.

Raza was born and raised in a small town in Madhya Pradesh where his father was a forest ranger. His experiences and memories of growing up close to nature and the environment later churned into his incessant brushstroke and dripping in the 70s. The exhibition’s title is taken from a 1971 oil on canvas painting titled Zamina phenomenal gestural work— beams of yellow, orangish red, and green screams from behind the aggregating black fuid that barely cohere of imagery in our eye. While in France during 1960s and 70s, Raza revisited the forest landscapes in India bringing defning compilations from remembered residues of his mind. Almost notating the mild conversations heard from a distance or fery fames visible in the middle of the night.

During 1948–55, Raza turned dramatically lyrical watercolours on paper to paradigms in landscapes— works such as Houses with Medieval Church, Church at Meulen, Mosque being good examples. These works trace diversities in rectilinear views and feature structures drawn from an aerial vantage in the delightful diagonal brushwork. With blocks and broken lines on ochre and brownish grey ground or sky- these architectural constructs sometimes are a dense mass of black, unsubstantial structures, cubist contours or tin-like translucent flatness of burnt sienna, grey and ochres that occupy the blazing ground but, with no specifics of time and place. Scenes in graphite where Raza indefinitely erases and draws (leaving the lines visible than removing them with an eraser), where lines multiply to construct. A few contours define the wall, roof and depth of the structures that hint at the window or door – a pictorial frame looks cohesive as a picture but hardly situates one location in the viewer’s mind. Traced in a scene, Untitled (1952) gouache on paper has a burnt sienna sphere that looms large between the disproportionate structures suspended in cosmic space—it appears like twin cities were split, while they share a sun or a moon telling a mythical tale of light and darkness. As we move through the exhibition, a black dot (we imagine we know so much about it, yet we struggle with its presence) is cosmically framed in the middle of a square, moving, forwarding (in its entirety always) across the plane. Raza’s late works develop many forms of this dot— from an orb in a landscape to a circle, mass, or sun, embedded amid a tile-like mosaic which at times relocates across the plane. The show culminates with a work titled Amar Kantak (1998) with verso text that reads, ‘Amarkantak, Mandala, Kakaiya, Dindori, Niwas, Satpuda, Vindhyachal, Narmada, Narsinghpur… my thoughts and life forces are driven by these (places). Eternal memories. In gratitude to my homeland – Raza.’ Names of these places variously suggest sites of pilgrimage, where mountains collide, rivers meet, and saints had resided. If not human-like, the dot emanates a humanising effect on us as we constantly follow its path in the exhibition. The artist moved away from pictorial constructions in the mid-1950s to experiment with the forms of abstractions—rising from substantial, tangible traces of buildings to attain a full circle to culminate in symbol, motif, geometry which is predictable of a matured seeker in a person. In the show, the artist’s most prodigious works are of the 70s—where he revisits memories in most discomforting brush strokes—in fleeting blobs and dashes across the canvas. The artist’s experiences of nature and land emanate in colours and emotions that echoe his calling in loss and longing for his homeland.

Zamin: Homelands’, Curated by Puja Vaish, Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Mumbai, 2 June–31 July 2022.

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In the Blink of an Eye

Hosted by the Gallery Dotwalk in Gurgaon, this multi-artist exhibition tendentially gathers ten artists' diverse arrays of work hinting at time as the entanglement of histories, displaced beings, memories of a place, operating through pandemics and shifting urban landscapes.

A brief moment exists between the state of wakefulness and sleep, and also before waking up of untethered, blurred, tumbling thoughts capable to us humans. These states are scientifically defined as hypnagogic - a state immediately before falling asleep, and hypnopompic - a state leading to consciousness or being awake. The two states are different in character; the former slips us through an imaginary, fantasised and unconscious moment before drifting into sleep. It is a non-governed state of an individual shutting the brain, dissolving mental filters and slowly dismantling the concepts of the world. All of our models, norms and ideas of a constrained world pull apart its meaning in the slightest of dizzy recalling. The latter state brings us closer to the reality. It is a state of steadily reaching consciousness when we begin to realise the self, things and people, place and the surroundings.

Comparatively, the state of alertness is subjective to human recollection. How do we make sense of reality, then? Does the past mean anything to us in relation to thinking of the future – while in the present? In the Blink of an Eye considers the states of transcending into sleep and being awake as a metaphor to reflect on time as extended, indefinite and an inconsecutive happening, event, and passage. Each artist featured in this exhibition explores the human state of being in the process of transition between reality and the unfamiliar, through their artistic practice and approaches.

Featured works by:

Bhisaji Gadekar(Goa), Chandan Bez Baruah(Guwahati), Jyothi Basu (Vadodara), Kundan Mondal(Vadodara), Midhun Gopi(Kerala),Prajakta Palav Aher(Mumbai), Rachana Nagarkar(Mumbai), Saju Kunhan(Mumbai), Sneh Mehra(Vadodara), Shruti Mahajan(Hyderabad)        

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A Moving House or a Landscape

Exhibition review of works by Shreya Pate at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai: “A Moving House or a Landscape”, TAKE on Art. Books, Volume 1, Issue 27, April, 2022

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Early '00 onwards: Video Art in India

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The Absent Figure and The Intimate Present

Special Report published in Anthology of Exhibitions, ARTIndia magazine, Volume XXI Issue II, May 2017, 35

A dual display curated by Girish Shahane hinged on two phrases from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, was hosted by Gallery OED, Fort Kochi, recently. Country Matters, mounted at the Beyond Malabar gallery, from the 9th of December to the 10th of January, reflected contradictory attitudes towards sexuality in a strange yet astute manner. ‘‘Country matters’ is a play on the expression for female genitals. The show had five artists including Mithu Sen, T. Venkanna and Meenakshi Sengupta investigating the voyeur’s gaze, as well as the male gaze.

Send Some Candids by Fabien Charuau used downloaded porn photographs with defaced women, printed on A5 size paper, and hung with sexually suggestive comments found on the Internet. In contrast to Charuau’s deft imagery was Meenakshi Sengupta’s Spices that employed spices as pigments to make stark line drawings of nude women in pornographic poses with text that traversed between niches in the gallery.

Mithu Sen’s part skeleton, part spindly-legged male figures were uncompromising and filled with levity. T. Venkanna’s representation of male and female figures in an installation made of 34 images stuck together probably commented on the display of sexual imagery in public places. Dibin Thilakan’s sole painting worked within an art historical framework and was reminiscent of Aegean paintings, with its composition of ethereal rhythmic figures.This show dwelled on the contentious yet subtle undercurrents of our hypertrophic digital age, and probed the generation and use of slang in the media and everyday life.

Abstract Chronicles that featured works by six artists, from the 10th of December to the 24th of January at Gallery OED, highlighted the excesses of everyday imagery by transmuting them into abstract images. At the entrance, a glimpse of Parul Gupta’s work made you want to re- check whether the vertical lines were still or moving. The canvas with vertical lines, through subtle shifts, provided the viewer with a three-dimensional spatial experience. In an uncanny way the canvas of Sediments by Vibha Galhotra seemed to erupt with a sudden flash of black strokes. By contrast, Tanya Goel’s minimal monochromes Notations (Angle 50 Degrees), were surfaces that blended the excessive material diligently, and deceived the viewer with its imitation of the flickering screen with pixels. Everything is made available to us at one click in this virtual world. Fabien Charuau’s intensely coloured A Thousand Kisses Deep used prolific digital imagery that were processed through an algorithm that could express the energy of pixels in each image. These images were abstract representations of intimate moments like a couple kissing or a crowd praying. Charuau’s algorithms could well have cocked a snook at Georges Seurat in his time! Manish Nai’s print with hazy numerical draping carried layered billboard advertisements that questioned the painted surface and photographic imagery.

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Pieces

A search for granulate — it shreds down, chips of stone misplaced by a sculptor.

Though hard and tough, maybe it is unfinished, maybe lost to some battle, it might still be trying to stand, searching for the sculptor’s hand in the granulate it has shredded down.

Chopped, off-posture, limbs struck; a search for shards minced and flown. Masses of blow might still be trying to hold.

Monumentality — against spectators, accompanied by stoneware.

In the gone years, life realises weathered stones and the maker's absence: remains of slashed strokes, and a smiling face.

No choice but broken shards, intent on finishing the colossus presence; to humans, the pride of making and disrupting— peace and disorder, two sides of the same creature.

—2016

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At the dusk

It is not necessary to establish ground for everything one encounters or passes. This small piece of an event serves as a reminder of how easily moments can be forgotten, registered here in this digital apparatus from the evening of September 6, 2016. In Fort Kochi, Kerala, at a terrace restaurant, Talk of the Town, well known for its corner location facing Santa Cruz Basilica, I found a mild touch of grandmother's hand in their food. A white structure with ample space allowed one's view straight out of the restaurant's window towards the beach; the fading impression of people on the street dissolving. The sun had already parted to the other side of the earth. My phone's battery was reaching its rest. I went closer to the window to take a picture, or a few. In minutes evening seemed to turn deep into night. The street squared off with flashy yellow street lights. The passing of a vehicle left a fleeting image, unknowingly giving a movement to this picture—a disappearing apparition captured in a single click.