At Gujral House, ‘Material Matters’ Brings Art, Craft & Design Into Conversation

Conceived in 1969-70 by artist Satish Gujral and architect Raj Rewal, and continually reimagined and expanded over the subsequent decades, Gujral House in New Delhi has long occupied a liminal position between domestic architecture, artistic practice, and creative space. Its history is one of reinvention: a family home that once contained the artist’s life and work is now a multicultural space being reimagined through exhibitions and public programming.

On Sunday, 1 November 2026, Gujral House will open its doors to ‘Material Matters’, an exhibition curated by Alaiia Gujral, the artist’s granddaughter and creative director, artist-designer, curator and founder of Future Galerie. It brings together art, craft and design across eight rooms. Featuring photography, textiles, fibre arts, ceramics, design objects, architecture, and word art, the exhibition argues that creative ideas need not remain confined to the materials or disciplines from which they originate. Instead, they can migrate between forms, processes and practices, creating new associations along the way. 

“From the very beginning, I wanted the exhibition to tell a larger story — one that brings together different materials, ideas and disciplines, without limiting how we think about the next generation of creative practitioners,” Gupta says. “I also believe that an idea doesn’t have to belong to just one material or discipline. To develop an idea, you have to experiment with materials, bring them together and allow them to create a different language. That interplay is what interests me, and it’s what I wanted to explore through the exhibition.”

The exhibition draws on the house’s history of sustained creative dialogue, treating the structure as an active participant in its presentation. Its rooms and domestic scale invite encounters that may feel different from those in a conventional white-cube gallery. The exhibition grew, in part, through an open call that received close to 100 submissions, bringing emerging practitioners and BFA students into dialogue with established and lifelong makers.

“My own practice is interdisciplinary, and I’ve never believed in putting myself, or anyone else, into a box when it comes to art, design, architecture or any other discipline,” Gupta says. “I wanted to bring all these practices together under one roof. Having the opportunity to do this in my grandfather’s home made it even more meaningful. My grandfather was an interdisciplinary artist himself, so it felt natural to continue a conversation that I’ve grown up with, while also finding my own way through it.”

This approach also reflects a broader shift in the contemporary art scene, where curators are increasingly bringing together diverse disciplines, materials, and modes of expression that institutional emphasis on categorisation has traditionally kept apart into conversation with each other. Instead of organising creative work into separate compartments of fine art, craft, and design, Indian curators are exploring what emerges when these practices share a space. Such juxtapositions can unsettle established hierarchies of value, particularly the distinction between the singular artwork and the functional object, or between the artist’s conceptual gesture and the craftsperson’s embodied knowledge.

At ‘Material Matters’, these conversations are organised around material, process, form and feeling. The eight rooms occupied by the exhibits become a series of encounters between different ways of making, asking visitors to consider not only what an object represents, but how it came into being and what its material histories might reveal. But the challenge for such interdisciplinary exhibitions is to ensure that bringing different practices together produces more than visual variety. Material Matters offers an opportunity to consider how these encounters might make visible the relationships between materials, makers and the spaces they inhabit.

Material Matters will be on view at Gujral House, New Delhi, from 1-30 November 2026. All exhibited works will be available for acquisition. A portion of sales will support Khamir, a craft resource centre in Kachchh, Gujarat, whose work with artisan communities foregrounds the networks of farmers, spinners, weavers and dyers behind material culture.

Follow @alaiiagujral on Instagram to learn more.

If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:

Beyond The White Cube: ‘I Dwell In Possibility’ Wants To Reimagine Exhibitions In Ahmedabad

The Onion Project Is Mapping The Lives & Multitudes Of A City’s Streets

Ariba Akhlaque Uses Objects & Material To Navigate Grief, Memory, & The Notion Of Home