Curator Rahul Kumar Brings Modern, Folk and Contemporary Art Together Through Performing Ritual

Performing Belief curated by Rahul Kumar is the latest exhibition running at Kalakaar Art Salon in Delhi.  Bringing modern, folk and contemporary Indian art within the same space, various arts and their creators get tied together at the art gallery run by Saira and Shivin through the idea of ritual. Ritual that oftentimes is a ceremony, an offering, a prayer. Through works of Raza, Ram Kumar and Ramachandran, ritual becomes something the repeated motion that went into making the work -- the act itself.  

The fourth session, and the first that brings in a curator to build an exhibition at Kalakaar Art Salon, the exhibited art seeks to create sustained dialogues between modern Indian art and contemporary artistic practice which examines ritual beyond the mere representations of religious ceremony or sacred iconography, it is mainly through evolving cultural structure expressed through repetition, memory, labour, devotion and transformation.  

According to Kumar, across generations and artistic practices, ritual emerges as a way of negotiating identity, belonging and continuity within changing social, political and ecological landscapes. In conversation with Esquire India, the curator discusses how the theme of ritual came to be the theme of the exhibition, his views on modern art and more. 

Landscape was the example he kept finding while working this out."There is landscape that was made by Raza and Ram Kumar and Ramachandran throughout their lives. Paramjit continues to make a lot of landscapes. But the reason why the landscape was made by Raza is because he was living in Paris and he was responding to what he was seeing, or Ramachandran responding to the beauty of the lotus and the lilies. The period was different and their concerns were different." What stays the same, across all of them, is the pull to keep returning to landscape at all. What changes is why, shaped each time by whatever their own lives and experiences bring to it.

A difference in context can change an artist's medium entirely, and the way their art comes out the other side. It was a new country, in his telling, and everybody was trying to define what new India could mean, keen to dismiss Western ideology even as they stayed linked to tradition, the same tension visible in how miniature painting once celebrated gods and royalty before Company painting brought a Western influence into the mix. 

For a young artist today, that relationship with landscape can look very different. As Kumar puts it, "Today, when you see a young artist making landscapes, chances are ecology is what they're responding to. It is the depleting landscape, the changing landscape. Or it is a memory, it is my village, the way it used to look. But today I live in a city, and therefore I'm making it." 

The subject stays constant, while the reason for returning to it keeps shifting. That gap between subject and motive is what eventually narrowed into ritual, which Kumar splits into two parts. "Ritual as the subject we looked at across the three genres of modern, folk and contemporary. And then ritualistic practice of making, where the subject matter is very different but repetitiveness of doing the same action is creating the artwork." 

The first plays out as ritual as subject: Manu Parekh's Banaras, Jamini Roy's women carrying earthen pots home from the river, and Satyanarayan Gavara's wood-engraved panel of a pre-sowing ritual practiced by a farming community in the Manyam district of coastal Andhra Pradesh, where grain is offered before the season begins. 

Another way to interpret ritual is as practice, where the act of repeating takes precedence over the subject. Yudhishthir Maharjan, for instance, spends hours hand-cutting every single letter off the pages of discarded novels, working, in Kumar's words, "like a surgeon," before pasting the cut-out letters back down in a new arrangement. They are stories stored within observation. 

Kumar on Binaries and Distinctions 

For Kumar, the problem with repetition is that it sits uneasily with the idea of art as individual expression. He points to Husain, Souza and Jackson Pollock, painters whose hands you can recognise instantly, yet whose works are never quite the same. Set against that is a lot of contemporary Indian art where one piece can feel like the entire show. A person changes from one day to the next, he argues, so when a body of work hasn't moved in ten years, it is fair to question why. 

If repetition is the defense, craft has its own logic to answer to. "For craft to remain craft, it has to follow the heritage, it has to follow the pattern, the motifs and everything," he says.

"You can be influenced by that and create something, but for it to be called craft, it has to be of the heritage and the history. It's a community idea." Continuity and sameness are fundamental to the purity of the form, and repetition can't have it both ways. "If that repetition is crafty," he asks, "then why is their work not crafty?" 

A Collector's Living Room 

Kalakaar isn't setting out to be a contemporary gallery or a modern one, Saira and Shivin say. It's an art salon dealing in Indian art broadly, and the moderns just happen to make up most of what they show. Alongside exhibitions, they host lectures, music and dance evenings, and talks on how to start a collection, treating the space as a way into art.

Performing Belief, in their telling, is really about how art from different eras talks to itself: ritual meant one thing to an artist working right after independence, working toward a belief in something, and can mean something far more everyday now, a repeated habit rather than a devotion. 

"We wanted to take the intimidation away, where people feel that walking into a gallery, they need to already know something. Nothing is created independently, in space and time, or in a vacuum." The space rarely lets in more than fifty people at a time, works on appointment though walk-ins are welcome, and hosts lectures, music evenings and collecting workshops alongside their shows. 

The Group show: Performing Belief runs August 13th to September 30th, 2026, at Kalakaar Art Salon, Defence Colony, New Delhi.