Exhibition

A Love Letter To My Home
Akshita Gandhi
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Mumbai is known as the “City of Dreams” for its vibrance, chaos, and potential for upward mobility. With futuristic high-rises towering over slums, and postcolonial architecture bearing witness to struggles for freedom, the architecture of the city exposes the contradictions concealed by its name. Curated to celebrate the 75th anniversary of India’s independence. Gandhi’s work centres on Mumbai’s architecture, featuring photographs, drawings, and an installation. After studying internationally and returning from a patriarchal society to a traditional cultural background, Gandhi has struggled to comprehend what “home” means to her and thousands of Indians who flock to Mumbai year after year. With a focus on the postcolonial identity of Mumbai, a place where period architecture meets religious and cultural diversity, the artist reflects on the notions of displacement and belonging. While her art paints a love letter to the city, focused on what has been lost with time and modernization, Gandhi explores the constant tension between age-old traditions and modernization.

Akshita Gandhi is a photographer and multimedia artist based in Mumbai. The “Pin Code” series presents photographs of neighbourhoods set to be demolished, unfurling the nuances and contradictions of Mumbai, the city of dreams. In the mixed media painting, lightbox, and poetry series “Freedom, I Read Banned Books” (2019-2021) Gandhi advocates breaking free from patriarchal structures. Investigating Indian culture and using light as a guiding principle, Gandhi’s work speaks to the transformative power of artistic practice oscillating between interfaces of obscurity/perceptibility and construction/de-construction. Gandhi holds an MFA and her creations have been exhibited at twenty-seven galleries and art fairs globally.