Feb 22 2026 to Feb 22 2026 11:30 a.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Bangalore smells.

Jasmine at dawn, petrol in traffic, filter coffee and wet earth after the first rain, incense curling through temple courtyards, garbage fermenting in afternoon heat. We live inside this rich olfactory landscape, but rarely pause to notice it.

Indu Antony, however, has been mapping it for years.

In this 90-minute lecture-demonstration, Antony presents findings from Vāsané, Bangalore’s first smell archive. Part urban anthropology, part sensory memoir, the work traces how scent carries memory, class, labour, and belonging in ways the visual record cannot. Smell resists documentation. It’s intimate, fleeting, impossible to photograph. Which makes it a different kind of archive entirely.

Antony walks you through her practice of mapping the city with her nose. The streets, markets, lakes, and corners where Bangalore announces itself before you see it. How smell marks territory, signals change, and holds what we’ve lost. The lecture weaves fieldwork, personal narrative, and reflection on what it means to archive something so fugitive.

The session closes with a guided encounter: select scent-notes from the city, experienced in silence. An invitation to notice how your body remembers place beyond images and language.

Part of Pravāha 2026, The Body As Space: A Journey Through The Senses. This year’s festival is built around what we hear, smell, touch, taste, and see. Eight days of multisensory experiences through classical music, contemporary dance, installations, and conversations.

Artist

Indu Antony
Multidisciplinary Artist
Indu Antony is a multidisciplinary artist based in Bengaluru. Her practice sits at the intersection of feminism, the body, memory, and public space, weaving intimate personal narratives with larger socio-political questions.

Through long-term projects like Cecilia’ed, she examines how gendered bodies occupy public space—who gets to move through the city, who belongs, who is seen. Her work consistently pushes beyond the gallery, finding meaning in slow encounters, collective storytelling, and everyday rituals.

Deeply invested in community as artistic practice, Antony co-founded Kanike (with fellow artists) and Namma Katte, a women’s leisure and gathering space. Both are rooted in creating accessible, non-hierarchical spaces for dialogue, rest, and shared imagination.

She initiated Vāsané, Bengaluru’s first smell archive, mapping the city through its olfactory landscape as a counterpoint to the visual overload of the IT capital. Committed to widening access to self-publishing, especially for women, she founded Mazhi Books, an independent platform supporting experimental and personal narratives.

Her first book received wide recognition, marking the beginning of an ongoing engagement with books as intimate, tactile archives of lived experience.