Oct 11 2026 to Oct 11 2026 2:30 p.m.

Where

Museum of Art & Photography (MAP)

Kasturba Road, Bengaluru 560001

Event Description

In the second edition of Shared Futures, a talk series in conjunction with the exhibition, Beneath the Turning Sky, we take a close look into visual artist Rai’s practice and the different ways her work develops—allowing things to grow and shift along the way, with play, chance and frugality playing an important role in the process.

In conversation with curator Priya Chauhan, she will also touch on the suggestive interactions that are often present of her installations, and the ways these can shape an encounter with the work. Search Party, a video work that forms a pair with the painting that is part of the exhibition will also be screened.

The session will be followed by a hands-on workshop exploring invisible inks and ideas around latency.

Beneath the Turning Sky brings together artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, and textile practices, illuminating contemporary debates around ecology, technology, development, and our relationship with the environment. Through distinct visual languages, the exhibition asks: How might art reshape our collective stewardship of the planet?

Extending these questions beyond the gallery, Shared Futures creates a space for exchange through lectures, conversations, workshops, and other experimental formats. Across these encounters, the series considers what the arts can offer in turbulent times and how creative practices can help forge new ways of thinking, being, and building solidarity.

This series is supported by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies Foundation

Rai
Rai is a visual artist working across image-making, fiction and installation. Her work is interested in fluidity, movement and mobility, and the ways we negotiate our relationships to places, materials and one another.

Her work frequently engages with estuaries—places where ecological processes intersect with histories of trade and migration. She is drawn to these geographies for their porosity and for the ways they complicate fixed ideas of place and identity.

Working with inks, dyes, pigments and found objects, Rai allows materials and their particular qualities to shape her process through a frugal approach to making. Drawing from research, memory, and things encountered or collected along the way, her works often take the form of fragmented narratives, spaces and situations, reflecting on the malleability of recollection. Thresholds recur in her work as forms and as spaces. Fiction becomes a way of bringing these fragments into relation with one another.

Her work has been shown at Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Bangalore, Experimenter, Kolkata; Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa; HH Artspaces, Goa; Gallery Espace, New Delhi; KNMA, Delhi; and internationally at the Salzburg Summer Akademie, Austria; Hochschule Luzern, Switzerland; and Sandberg Design Institute, Netherlands, among others. Her practice has received support from the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), Goa Open Arts, Shared Ecologies, Delfina Foundation, Sharjah Art Foundation.