At India Art Fair, Two Odd & Almost Gods Explored Impermanence Through Culinary Art

Two Odd is a creative studio that uses food as a way to build narratives, often turning dining into a format for exploring larger social and cultural ideas. Founded by Akshita Garud and Sabah Sheikh, their work moves across curated experiences, editorial projects, and installations that treat the table as a site of dialogue. Projects like The Identity Potluck and Rotating Histories use food to trace multicultural identities, shared histories, and the afterlives of colonization — bringing together ingredients, forms, and formats that carry meaning beyond taste.

In their recent collaboration with Almost Gods at India Art Fair, Two Odd extends this approach into INTERVAL, a curated dining experience built as a multi-course, immersive setting. It brings together food, spatial design, and material elements into a single environment where guests move through it as participants, engaging directly with the experience as it unfolds. It sets itself up as ‘a deliberate counterpoint to a reality defined by unceasing information and transparency,’ opening with a question that runs through the entire experience: Is the silence empty, or is it full? The project is anchored in the ideas of impermanence, interval, and exchange, which serve as the foundation for everything else.

What this means in practice is a shift in how time and attention are handled. The experience asks participants to slow down and engage with intention, while also sitting with ambiguity instead of trying to resolve it. “In this space, "the ego recedes,” mentions the studio, moving away from the need to constantly express or perform. By stepping into what is described as a shared symbolic form, participants are held within the experience itself, without the usual pressure to explain, react, or present themselves.

Each course in the dinner isolates specific senses, guiding attention in a deliberate way and building a narrative around mindfulness through those shifts. The visual language follows the same approach described as a new Indian vernacular that is minimal and stripped of the traditional gaze, keeping the environment focused and reducing excess so that each element can be encountered on its own terms. Within this setting, the experience suggests that it is possible to detach from noise and arrive at a sense of belonging that does not depend on relentless communication and expression.

Blue runs through the room as a central element, operating as what the text calls a vessel for extremes. It holds together the crushing weight associated with the ocean floor and the openness of the sky, creating a vertical axis that connects to the idea of ascension. Moving through the space becomes a way of navigating this pull, shifting between density and openness.

At the same time, the material framework introduces a different kind of tension. Industrial elements structure the room, bringing in a raw, utilitarian quality, while unfinished concrete blocks anchor the space and extend the shared identities of Two Odd and Almost Gods into physical form. Tables, chairs, and objects are constructed through a modular system, with subtle shifts in their arrangement that keep the space from feeling fixed or overly resolved. Fire runs through the experience as a grounding element. Candles are placed centrally and across the room, and their presence shapes the atmosphere with the ‘sanctity of a temple’.

INTERVAL brings together these elements of impermanence, exchange, ambiguity, material tension, and sensory focus into a single, continuous experience. It extends Two Odd’s ongoing interest in building through food, while drawing on Almost Gods’ spatial and material language, allowing both practices to meet within the contemplative, constructed experience.

Follow Two Odd here and Almost Gods here.

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