Delhi is a city of ghosts. Its ruins, scattered across the national capital like punctuation marks across a restless text, remind us that all empires fall, no city is ever eternal. Yet, Delhi is also a living archive, a city of migrants, artists, poets, bureaucrats, politicians, and dreamers — each layering their own histories upon its soil. To live in Delhi is to live among palimpsests, where memory and forgetting, ruin and grandeur coexist in uneasy embrace.
This September, 'The City as a Museum', DAG’s travelling art and heritage festival, arrives in the capital to draw out these layers. For two weeks from 6 to 21 September, from gardens and embassies to archives and hotel lobbies, the city itself becomes a museum of its many pasts. Streets turn into galleries, book markets into living archives, performance spaces into memory theatres. What emerges is a chorus of voices — sometimes harmonious, often dissonant — speaking of how Delhi has imagined itself and been imagined by others over the years.
“A city is a living legacy of its history and culture in which art plays an important part alongside other streams and components, some of which are more visibly acknowledged than others. With The City as a Museum, we open doors and windows to parallels and conversations that are immersive, educational and investigative but also engaging and fun.”Ashish Anand, CEO and MD of DAG
At the centre of this inaugural Delhi edition of The City as a Museum is Sair-e-Dilli: Chronicles of Change, an exhibition curated by historian Swapna Liddle at Bikaner House, that tells the story of Delhi through paintings, maps, photographs, and prints. They capture the city across centuries: the arches of Mehrauli, the gridded lanes of Shahjahanabad, the domes of Nizamuddin, the boulevards of Lutyens’ Delhi. Rather than telling a story of rise and fall, of dynasties and capitals, Liddle’s exhibition insists on continuity — on the simultaneity of layers that refuse to vanish.
The festival also revisits Qudsia Bagh, where the 1903 Delhi Durbar staged an art exhibition that sought to define “Indian” art under imperial gaze. Later, in the years after Independence, state institutions around Mandi House — such as the Lalit Kala Akademi and the Sangeet Natak Akademi — became arbiters of taste, shaping the nation’s post-colonial modernism even as their authority was questioned. The curatorial thread of The Fifth Circle, a three-part public art project curated by Amitesh Grover, examines this terrain of negotiation. Through audio walks, performances, and discussions, it unravels the overlapping histories of state patronage and artistic resistance.
Elsewhere, the story of Delhi’s art unfolds through its collectives and countercultures: Safdar Hashmi’s JANAM, the activist interventions of SAHMAT, the experiments at Garhi Studios, even the ITC Maurya Hotel, where Krishen Khanna’s The Great Procession still marches across the wall. In each case, art becomes a form of reckoning with the multitudes of Delhi.
To call a city a museum is to embrace a paradox. A museum implies stillness, preservation, and archival authority; a city, on the other hand, is always in flux — cities thrive on fluidity, change, and improvisation. Still, perhaps Delhi, with its restless layering of ruins and reinventions, is the city best suited to such a metaphor. By staging art in gardens, archives, hotels, and streets, the festival highlights these contradictions that define Delhi: the imperial alongside the insurgent, the monumental beside the vernacular, the canonical beside the popular.
Sair-e-Delhi: Chronicles of Change, an exhibition curated by historian Swapna Liddle, presenting paintings, prints, photographs, maps and plans that tell a nuanced story of Delhi is on view at Bikaner House from 7 to 15 September 2025. Learn more about the exhibition here.
The first Delhi edition of DAG’s ‘The City as a Museum’ art & heritage festival is taking place from 6 to 21 September 2025, through an integrated series of exhibitions, walks, talks, performances, and discussions across various sites in Delhi. Learn more about the event here.
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