MCAA and GALLERYSKE’s ‘I Dwell in Possibility’ in Ahmedabad showcases contemporary Indian art alongside literature, music, and ecology. Featuring works by five artists, it offers an immersive experience that challenges conventional gallery formats and highlights environmental and cultural themes.
‘I Dwell in Possibility’, presented by GALLERYSKE and the Museum of Contemporary Art Ahmedabad (MCAA), brings together five contemporary Indian artists in an exhibition that reaches beyond the boundaries of a conventional gallery space. On view until 1 November 2026, it marks the start of MCAA’s exhibition and outreach programme at its Ahmedabad satellite venue, bringing visual art into dialogue with literature, design, architecture, music, ecology and food. The exhibition opened as a parallel event alongside the first India Art Fair - Editions in Ahmedabad in September this year.
Featuring works by Avinash Veeraraghavan, Buddhadev Mukherjee, Dia Mehhta Bhupal, Sudarshan Shetty and Sunil Padwal, the exhibition brings together selections from GALLERYSKE’s programme, private collections and MCAA’s growing collection of South Asian contemporary art, alongside new works created specifically for the show. Several artists are exhibiting in Ahmedabad for the first time. A curatorial framework connects their work and invites visitors to consider art through the perspectives of practitioners working across different disciplines.
The exhibition borrows its title from the opening line of Emily Dickinson’s poem I Dwell in Possibility and imagines the exhibition as a house that opens outward. Each artwork offers a point of departure for encounters with other forms of knowledge and practice. According to Rhea Maheshwari, Director, GALLERYSKE, “the poem (...) describes a house that refuses to behave like one. Dickinson gives it all the parts — windows, doors, chambers, a roof — and each turns out to open rather than enclose. The roof becomes the sky. That is the spirit of this collaboration too: to see what a museum and a gallery can make together, outside a fixed format of exhibition making. It allows for a kind of looking a white cube doesn’t quite permit: should a viewer wish to indulge, they can lie on a daybed, surrounded by plants, listening to music, with several practices in view at once.”
Arjun Jayadev, Professor of Economics and Director at the Centre for the Study of the Indian Economy at Azim Premji University, has selected a book to accompany each artwork, and furniture studio Phantom Hands has curated pieces from its Geoffrey Bawa Collection. Landscape architect Aditya Shah offers a botanical response to the works, music archivist Nishant Mittal creates a sonic landscape, and culinary researcher Sheetal Bhatt brings regional food histories and recipes into the space. The result is an immersive, multisensory exhibition that encourages visitors to experience art through reading, listening, gathering and engaging with their surroundings. By bringing together these varied practices, the collaboration between GALLERYSKE and MCAA proposes an alternative to the conventional white-cube gallery, opening up new ways of thinking about how art inhabits and interacts with everyday life.
The exhibition also signals MCAA’s broader ambition to establish a cultural destination in Ahmedabad that fosters public engagement with contemporary art and creates opportunities for exchange among artists, institutions and audiences. Founded by Aneri D. Patel, the museum is developing its programme through a series of exhibitions and outreach initiatives that offer audiences an early encounter with its institutional vision.
Running concurrently with the second edition of Ahmedabad Culture Week (ACW Ed. 2), I Dwell in Possibility forms part of a wider cultural programme that examines the global climate crisis and its implications for the natural and built environments. Ahmedabad Culture Week, taking place from 23 October to 1 November 2026, brings together 18 cultural venues across the city to highlight the effects of rising global temperatures, extreme weather events, and human-driven environmental change.
The programme seeks to open conversations about land exploitation, deforestation, pollution, and contamination, while foregrounding the need for sustainability, carbon neutrality, biodiversity protection, and environmental conservation. These concerns are especially urgent in India, where floods, cyclones, heatwaves and other extreme weather events continue to threaten communities, agriculture and infrastructure. Against this backdrop, the festival looks to cultural spaces as sites for collective engagement with the ecological challenges shaping the present and future. Through its interdisciplinary approach, I Dwell in Possibility complements the wider conversations taking place across the city, offering an encounter with contemporary art that moves between the intimate spaces of everyday life and the larger systems that shape our relationship with the environment.
‘I Dwell in Possibility’ will run till 1 November 2026, with a public events programme slated concurrently for the Ahmedabad Cultural Week.
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