This November sees Experimenter, Kolkata, presenting three exhibitions dedicated to contemporary art and photography. While Radhika Khimji’s abstract invocations of tactile temporality take over at the gallery’s Hindustan Road address, viewers are introduced to the painterly side of photographer Sohrab Hura at the Ballygunge Place branch. Hura also debuts two photographic series on Kashmir and Madhya Pradesh at a new viewing space that has opened up at the Alipore Museum.
Radhika Khimji: The Line is Time
The title exhibition may remind one of Paul Klee’s definition of the active line as a point progression in his Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925). [1] There is a homology with Klee’s logic in Khimji’s phenomenology of geographies, as she closely engages with the unheimlich (uncanny) of the natural world through repetitive mark-making, appropriating and innovating on spatial planes of possibilities. Most of the works are layered with a photographic imprint/transfer of images of certain terrestrial spaces.
Khimji’s works mimic the multilayered density that characterizes the natural world. For instance, a photograph of the Al-Hajar mountain range in Oman, taken during her recurrent visits, serves as the surface of “Satiated to a Point,” which is the largest display in the show. Khimji used a variety of mediums and methods to develop the work. The photograph was screen-printed on a large linen fabric and layered with a three-tiered, stratified mountain range, created through a patchwork of black thread embroidery, a red translucent wash of red, and a white stitch-like conical surface, made of tiny dotted strokes of thick white paint. These many levels and play with spatial volumes, dimensions and superimpositions intensify the temporal density of the mountain’s history.
While this piece stands colossal and erect like a mountain across the gallery’s most prominent wall, a circular work, depicting an eyeless fish, paired with two external circular forms suggesting eyes, rests on the floor within the sunken pit section. Experiencing this work requires the viewer to lower their gaze, a position quite unlike the ubiquitous visibility a mountainscape typically demands. First shown at the Venice Biennale 2022, “Fish Head” was born from the story of the blind fishes that inhabit a popular cave in the Al-Hajar mountain range. For Khimji, they reinforced how perception is shaped by a subjective experiencing of our immediate environment.
The displays vary widely in scale, containing both multiple large-format works and small drawings on diary pages. The artist treats the latter like a portable studio: they are intimate but open into terrains as vast and topologically charged as the bigger frames.
Khimji is an architect of speculative inhabitation who stitches time with patchworks of miniscule lines that demand slow, meticulous labour. Time is an experiential category in all her works: it exists as a trace of constructive action, but there is also an incredible presence of ‘absence’ in the gaps produced by the artist’s intermittently punctuated lines. These testify to the ‘nothingness-in-between’ lurking as a persistent apparition in the act of meaning-making. Khimji excels in constructing the sublime with ‘almost nothing’ in her colossal nature-spaces and three-dimensional zones of depth, magnitude and quiet grandeur.
Sohrab Hura: The Forest and A Winter Summer
Sohrab Hura, who is popularly known for his photographic practice but lives a creative life absorbed in a rather liminal space of interdisciplinary practice, turns to self-training again, this time in the medium of paintings.
The Forest exhibits a large collection of works with oil paints, dry pastels and gouache, related to a range of themes, covering public events and private emotions that govern contemporary lives. Snapshots of Hura’s family and their struggles with mental and physical health, scenes from nature and city life, responses to political upheaval (such as the Babri Masjid demolition or anti-CAA protests), memories of popular culture and even memes find their way into these works.
What is common is a luminosity created through impressionistic stipples and waves of bright colours. Intriguingly, the captions are either scribbled on the edges of the canvases or on the walls, replicating a near child-like candour that is also seen in Hura’s drawn and painted forms and figures. Even while painting serious and darker subjects, the artist never loses touch with satire and beauty. Each work stands as a distinct piece, not bound by rigid stylistic or conceptual conventions that typically define a painterly series.
Hura uses the metaphor of plant growth to frame the dialogue between these new paintings and his older works. This is also evident in the title The Forest, implying a slow unfolding of the artist’s creativity. This is an extension of an idea he first explored in his 2021 curatorial debut, Growing like a Tree, where he tried to understand his own existence as a tree gradually spreading its roots and branches, nourished by a symbiotic ecosystem of friendship and mentorship. The tree has now evolved into a dense and sturdier forest, capable of accommodating and nurturing the many contradictions and carnivalesque nature of life.
Hura’s paintings take on an installation form in Timelines. This series of nine corrugated cardboard boxes have their outward surfaces filled with scenes borrowed from archival images, films and media. Each has a thematic anchor/common denominator that connects a set of images of personal and collective significance. The titles chosen are: Mail, The School, The Olive Tree, The Bus, The Bees, Sheila, Protest, Mother and Delhi. The Olive Tree, for instance, weaves together references to the Holocaust, the Nakba (1948), the West Bank separation wall, the 2024 standing ovation for Netanyahu in the US Congress, studio photographs of Palestinian weddings from the 1960-90s, and images of poppy flowers. The School traces critical histories of Dalit experience, drawing on Hura’s close friend Jaisingh Nageswaran’s work, invoking Ambedkar’s renunciation of Hinduism and conversion to Buddhism, recalling a school demolished by upper-caste villagers during a 1980s festival and so on. Mother is deeply intimate -- it includes a painted portrait of Hura’s mother, family photographs, and a direct visual reference to the Partition of India (an event that deeply impacted the artist and his family).
The rest of the boxes are transformed into similar multilayered portals, as Hura brings unexpected weight and intellectual richness to the apparent lightness, fragility anddisposabilityofordinarycardboard boxes. He also creates a kind of structured play, where narratives across different cultures and periods are placed in conversation with each other, and can be remobilized in accordance to how one intends to assemble or traverse through the visible surfaces of the boxes.
In another section, a film titled Disappeared plays out in a slow, sparse manner. Time feels dilated as the camera focuses its almost static gaze on a tent in the forest. The view is pared down to its chromatic elements but heightened in ambience through auditory cues. This close attention paid to elements of nature can be seen in other paintings in the show, some of which deal with landscapes of Kashmir. Amidst the celebration of the simpler joys of springtime and summer in the valley, there are hints of clandestine meetings in groves but also the earth turning into a burial ground for slain youth.
This kind of bittersweetness pervades Hura’s photographs from A Winter Summer, where the harshness of Kashmir’s winter stands in contrast against but also speaks to the rough summers of Barwani in central Madhya Pradesh. These territories may have very different socio-political and climatic predicaments, but the toughened spirits with which their local communities negotiate the difficulties of daily physical and civic conditions bring their stories together.
One half of the exhibition has images from a series called Snow. These were taken during Hura’s frequent visits to Kashmir over a span of about five years until 2019, before the governmental dismissal of Article 370. The photographs trace different lyrical phases of the snowy winters -- from the biting frost to the slow thaw -- which become a metaphor for the changing state of governance in Kashmir. In the other half are displays from the series The Song of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer. Set in the village of Savariyapani, they document people at work and leisure against a parched, barren environment, marked by varying shades of brown and yellow, with only a few patches of green.
While the Kashmir images are clubbed in clusters, the Bharwani series are laid out in a horizontal sequence. In both cases though, there is no obvious attempt to build any singular narrative. Rather, there are little pockets of momentariness which unfold simultaneously to paint a complex, layered picture of a land and its people. What especially impresses are the details woven in, especially in the Kashmir series, where a river turning red, or a set of gauged out eyes (one may ask: animal or human?) represent an undertone of violence that has sadly come to be inextricable from the region and its communities.
The artist’s message lies hidden in these minutiae. Hura’s choice to adopt a subtler stance allows him to avoid falling into the traps of the traditional anthropological, photojournalistic and touristy gazes. Like much of his prior photographic practice, these images carry a greater deterministic sense of Erfahrung in the guise of the fragmentary and the direct affectivity of Erlebnis. Hura transgresses the limited nature of ‘telling’ to suggest deeper interpretations by the use of skillful masquerade.
Even though their approaches and mediums are very different, both Khimji and Hura wish to reclaim Time through their respective bodies of work. They push the spectator to look beyond the quick aesthetic gratification that the surface beauty of aesthetic images might initially offer, and contemplate the value of slowness, and the ways in which Time reshapes history, narrative, and ultimately meaning.
Notes
[1] Klee conceives of the line as the temporal trace of a point in motion.
The Line is Time is on view at Experimenter, Hindustan Road, from November 5, 2025 to January 3, 2026; The Forest at Experimenter, Ballygunge Place, from November 5, 2025 to January 3, 2026; and A Winter Summer at the Alipore Museum from November 6 to December 6, 2025.
Sneha Biswas is an art practitioner and researcher with a background in Art History and English Literature. She is keenly engaged in the criticality of meaning-making, and the intersections of visual arts and psychoanalysis.