"We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams..."
— Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Ode (1874)
In The Music Makers, on view at APRE Art House in Colaba till 25 May 2025, the artist is not just a creator but a builder of culture — silent, ambiguous, and reflective. The exhibition brings together 17 participating artists from the now-concluded Mumbai Artists In Residency (MAIR) program which took place at the Gallery's residency space near the Mumbai Airport in Sakinaka, presenting works shaped by the passing of aeroplanes and the blaze of sunsets which became their metronome — temporal markers of a practice attuned to ephemera.
The exhibition, which borrows its title from British poet and herpetologist Arthur O'Shaughnessy's 1874 poem Ode, makes an implicit argument: that artists are "the dreamers of dreams" — world-makers who shape meaning at the edges of dominant discourse. In The Music Makers, this idea becomes a curatorial ethos — one that privileges emerging voices, process over product, and the lyrical over the linear.
The works on view span painting, sculpture, and lens-based media, united less by form than by a keen creative sensibility that resists commodification, embraces ambiguity, and challenges the primacy of outcome. In invoking The Music Makers, the exhibition also gestures toward the broader cultural labour of rising voices: artists who, much like O'Shaughnessy's dreamers, "build up the world’s great cities" not with stone, but with gesture, reflection, and imagination. In that spirit, the exhibition treats ambiguity not as a void but as a site of generative potential — a space where uncertainty gives rise to meaning.
This reorientation is particularly resonant in the context of the MAIR program, which the gallery launched to support emerging artists based in India. The residency’s physical context — a rooftop terrace, open skies, the roar of departing jets from the nearby Mumbai Airport — provided not just space, but atmosphere. These conditions left their mark in the resulting works which feel temporally aware, responsive, and deliberately unresolved.
In positioning the artist as a thinker — not merely a maker — The Music Makers proposes another kind of gaze: one attentive to slowness, to liminality, to the marginal. If the mainstream art world prizes spectacle and salability, this exhibition values process, experimentation, poetics, and the political act of art-making itself. It’s a curatorial stance that aligns with APRE Art House’s broader mission: to cultivate a pluralistic, thoughtful contemporary art culture rooted in dialogue and discovery.
Since its inception by Prerna Jain in 2022, APRE Art House has built a reputation for museum-quality exhibitions and a commitment to price transparency and collector education in India. The Music Makers takes this approach a step further — it calls to recognize artistic labour as cultural labour, and the artist as an imagination worker of dreams and futures. In a city as frenetic and cynical as Mumbai, that is certainly a radical gesture.
The Music Makers, a MAIR Alumni Show, is on view at APRE Art House till 25 May, 2025. Learn more about the exhibition here.
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