At Gallery Art Motif, Space Making: Making Space, curated by Kunal Shah, brings together artists, designers, and architects to interrogate how space is constructed, contested, and inhabited across human and more-than-human worlds.
In 1976, a team of French and Pakistani archaeologists discovered one of the earliest modern human settlements in Asia at the village of Mehrgarh, located at the foot of the Bolan Pass in Balochistan, present-day Pakistan. There, archaeologists found small, rectangular, multi-room mud-brick-and-mortar houses, some of which were used for shelter and others for long-term storage of barley and wheat as early as 7,000 BCE. The discovery was remarkable for several reasons: one, it was likely the birthplace of agriculture in South Asia; two, the settlement was likely inhabited by the precursors to the Indus Valley Civilisation; and three, several of these man-made structures show traces of red ochre paint on their external walls, indicating that they were possibly painted red, or even adorned with paintings in their time — signs that humans have always carved out spaces for meaning or ascribed aesthetic purpose to purely utilitarian spaces.
In his 1974 book ‘La Production de l’espace’ (The Production of Space), French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre theorised that space is not a neutral container but a social product, continuously reproduced through lived practice, political will, and symbolic inscription. Like the prehistoric settlement of Mehrgarh, this idea finds a surprisingly varied set of interlocutors in ‘Space Making: Making Space’, curated by architect, curator, and exhibition designer Kunal Shah, on view at Gallery Art Motif, New Delhi, till 25 April 2026. The exhibition brings together eleven contemporary artists, architects, and design studios whose practices concern how space is claimed, consecrated, and contested today. The results differ in ambition but are consistent in their underlying seriousness.
The inclusion of Mumbai-based RMA Architects’ Hathigaon, a habitat designed for over one hundred elephants and their mahouts situated at the foothill of the Amber Palace and Fort near Jaipur, forces the question of who counts as a spatial subject at all. The project insists on the animals’ claim to designed space — their needs, their scale, their social structures — as legitimate design briefs. The work sits alongside Indrajit Khambe’s photographs of farmers demarcating fields with repurposed saris, and together they constitute the exhibition’s most pointed social argument: that the most urgent spatial practices may be those occurring entirely at the margins of formal design culture.
“‘Space Making: Making Space’ is an exploration of what it means to carve, claim, and consecrate space, across time, materials, communities, and species. It is as much about what is built as what is imagined, as much about presence as about the boundaries that hold it.”— Kunal Shah, Curator
The textile works are among the most visually compelling in the show. New York-based Japanese textile designer Chiaki Maki’s fabric structures evoke the chilman — the woven bamboo curtain that has long mediated the negotiation between visibility and privacy in Indian domestic life — while Tilak Samarawickrema’s tapestries take architectural blueprints as their starting point and soften them into something warm and tactile. Both artists are interested in what happens when the hard language of construction passes through the body, drawing on the feminist reclamation of textiles as a spatial medium, from Anni Albers to contemporary practices.
Baroda-based artist Maitreyi Desai’s tight, evolving grids and Percy Pithawala’s explosive architectural drawings occupy the exhibition’s more formally rigorous register, while Pooja Iranna’s sculptures and paintings bring the experience of urban density — its stacking, its compression, and its relentless character — within the gallery space.
The sacred slips in at the edges of the exhibition: vintage prabhavalis, the ornate ritual frames around devotional images and idols in South Indian temples, and the lime-plastered chini khaanas of Araish stand as reminders of how humans have never, in any culture or era, been content to leave functional space purely functional. The granary gets painted, the threshold gets chalked with rangoli, the factory wall gets tiled with colour. Even the farmer’s field — already a working landscape, already shaped by labour and necessity — gets bounded with a sari, turning use into statement, turning land into place. This impulse runs deeper than decoration; it is the insistence that wherever we spend our lives deserves to carry some trace of meaning, of beauty, of the sacred. Shah’s curatorial instinct, at its best, is to hold all of these impulses together — the monumental and the domestic, the designed and the improvised, the human and the non-human — and let them speak to one another.
‘Space Making: Making Space’, curated by Kunal Shah, is on view at Gallery Art Motif, A1-178 Safdarjung Enclave, Fourth Floor, New Delhi, till 25 April 2026. Learn more here.
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