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St+art India Foundation returns to Kolkata with ADDA: The Third Space at TRI Art & Culture that reimagines the Bengali tradition of adda as an art form. Through installations, murals, and participatory programs, the exhibition aims to revive Kolkata’s fading culture of conversation and community.
If you’ve ever wandered through Kolkata’s older neighbourhoods — especially the narrow lanes of the north — you’ve probably seen small groups of men, and occasionally women, gathered on porches or street corners, deeply engaged in conversation. Their talks flow easily from politics to cinema, from cricket to the price of fish at the local market. Except, these are not simply casual chats or neighbourly exchanges; they are addas — a social and intellectual ritual woven into the very fabric of life in Kolkata.
Adda is one of those untranslatable words that defy simple definition. It captures a spirit of discussion that is both relaxed and politically charged, casual yet intellectually rich. If Athens had its Socratic dialogues, Paris its salons during the Belle Époque, and Buenos Aires its 19th-century tertulias, Kolkata has its adda — the city’s most democratic space, where debate, humour, philosophy, and gossip coexist without hierarchy.
From teashops and bookstalls to crumbling rowaks, Kolkata’s adda culture once animated the city’s third spaces, giving rise to its distinct intellectual hum. But as gated communities rise and the city’s old architecture gives way to glass towers, those porous spaces for public intimacy — the rowaks, or shaded ledges at the edge of homes — are gradually disappearing.
ADDA: The Third Space, the opening exhibition of St+art Foundation’s Kolkata 2025–26 programming at TRI Art & Culture is an intervention against this disappearance. The exhibition transforms the restored 1940s family home into a living embodiment of the Bengali adda — that leisurely yet charged conversation between the private and public, the artistic and the political.
Conceptualised as both exhibition and intervention, The Third Space gathers sculptural interventions, immersive installations, and participatory programmes that foreground dialogue as medium. The title draws from sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s notion of the “third place” — a communal zone beyond home and work that nurtures democracy and belonging. In Kolkata, that concept finds its most organic expression in adda, where ideas meander without agenda and intimacy emerges from argument.
By bringing adda into the gallery, St+art and TRI invite visitors to inhabit TRI as they might a rowak — a threshold where boundaries blur and chance encounters bloom. It’s a fitting gesture in a city that once thrived on its public intellectualism but now contends with shrinking third spaces.
In reviving the adda as both subject and structure, ADDA: The Third Space becomes an intervention against urban amnesia — a reminder that the spirit of Kolkata has always been conversational, made not of concrete, steel, and glass, but of ideas that refuse to stay indoors and spill out onto streets, tea-shacks, and the public sphere.
ADDA: The Third Space is on view at Tri Art & Culture, Kolkata, till 4 January 2026. To learn more about workshops, walkthroughs, and more, follow St+art and Tri Art & Culture.
If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:
Kolkata’s Disappearing ‘Rowaks’ Once Shaped A Culture Of Conversation
“Sassoon Docks Found Us”: How St+Art Is Shaping The Legacy Of Homegrown Urban Art
Coffee & Adda — Brewing Nostalgia In Kolkata’s Famous Coffee House
