Nothing Arrives Unchanged: Curated by Satyajit Dave

Labour, Transfer and the Uneven Life of Forms

An exhibition usually presents arrival as origin. A sculpture stands on its pedestal, an installation occupies its measured wall, a painting receives light, and the visitor encounters each as a resolved fact. The conditions that preceded this appearance recede. Materials, electricity, labour, inherited images and prior uses are condensed into the artwork’s present tense. No Object Begins Here starts from the proposition that this apparent beginning is false, but useful. Every work has already passed through other lives, yet the encounter permits those lives to be investigated even when they cannot be recovered in full.

The exhibition did not begin with a theory of materiality. It began with close looking. Across nine practices, certain operations recurred: folding, firing, cutting, stitching, bending, joining, repeating, illuminating, enclosing, weathering and preserving. Each altered what a material could do, how a body might approach it, and which histories became perceptible. A staple
accumulated into architecture. A tyre tube entered a textile structure as a belt, strap and industrial skin. An image of demolition was routed and folded around a fragment of clearance machinery. A fired vessel became less a container than a guarded interior. Form appeared as a way of organising relations.

My method was to follow those relations outward, then return to the object. Close looking established a formal fact. Material research identified the actions and technical conditions that produced it. Actor Network Theory offered a limited means of mapping participants such as artist, resident, fabricator, machine, kiln, electrical supply, gallery wall and collector. Bruno
Latour’s distinction between an intermediary that carries something and a mediator that changes it is useful here. A kiln transforms clay through heat and atmosphere, introducing effects that exceed exact prediction.[1] Yet connection is not explanation. A demolition machine, a displaced resident, an artist and an aluminium panel do not possess equivalent power, responsibility or exposure to harm. The map became a beginning for research, not its conclusion.

Social history and political economy were required to ask who controlled a process, supplied its labour, carried its risks and received its value. Iconology and object biography were required for a mythic image, a postcard, an antique key or a coconut form. Phenomenology remained necessary because no causal account could replace scale, weight, opacity, balance and interval. Each expanded interpretation was then tested against the artwork. Unsupported arguments were removed. Missing information remained a research condition rather than curatorial certainty.

Artistic form complicates that process, but does not stand outside it. No Object Begins Here directs attention to what precedes the gallery without promising a first origin. Every work is a singular formal achievement and a temporary consolidation of relations that continue after display. That tension is particularly acute in Asim Waqif’s Demolition Analysis: Madrasi Camp 4
(2026). According to the supplied work record, an image of demolition at Madrasi Camp, Jangpura, in 2025 was subjected to image analysis, translated through CNC routing and UV printing onto aluminium composite panel, folded, then mounted on a scrap mudguard from a JCB 3DX backhoe acquired in Mayapuri. The sequence moves from habitation to clearance,
from clearance to photograph, from photograph to data, and from data to a cut and folded object. At every stage, evidence is transformed. The work does not return the demolished dwelling. Nor can it represent the experience of its residents. It makes the technical conversion of that loss visible while withholding any claim to restore it.

The documented legal history sharpens this distinction. In May 2025, the Delhi High Court recorded 370 dwellings at Madrasi Camp, of which 189 had been found eligible for rehabilitation, and directed demolition after a contested relocation process to Narela.[2] The judgement participates in the work’s history, but is not a neutral account. It frames the settlement through law, drainage, public land and eligibility, while recording residents’ objections
and questions about amenities. The JCB fragment is no innocent witness. Its conversion into an exhibitable object asks under what conditions social destruction becomes cultural value.

Bent Plate Analysis 4 (2025) approaches evidence differently. A cyanotype photogram on galvanised steel joins physical bending to a light-dependent chemical process. Cyanotype produces Prussian blue through the photochemical reduction of iron salts; in a photogram, contact and obstruction determine where light acts.[3] Light is therefore productive rather than merely illuminative. The plate records exposure while its folds interrupt the flatness expected of a photographic support. Yet this index is also partial. Contact produces an image, but not a complete history of what touched, blocked or shaped the surface. The work models the exhibition: evidence emerges through a controlled procedure, then remains dependent upon
angle, substrate and care.

Electricity becomes both a condition and a visible event in Shanthamani Muddaiah’s Untitled (2026), where textile, tyre tubes and a metal frame are activated by red LED light. The work’s woven horizontal bands resemble a dense industrial screen, but the rubber and textile remain materially dissimilar. One bends and grips, the other folds and carries patterns associated with
dress and manufacture. The red illumination equalises them optically while intensifying seams, loops and hanging lengths. Electricity is not background service here. It is an infrastructural requirement, a historical subject and a force that changes what the installation looks like.

The artist has situated the work partly within Bengaluru’s histories of electrical power, textile manufacture, power looms, rubber and industrial labour. These cannot be compressed into a seamless civic narrative. Electric street lighting was inaugurated in Bengaluru in 1905 using power from Shivanasamudra, while its composite cotton mills rose from the late nineteenth century and largely closed by the early twenty-first.[4] Research on the former mill districts shows deindustrialisation persisting through land, family history and workers’ recollection.[5] The tyre relation still requires documentation. The work brings distinct materials and temporalities into a common powered field, not a shared origin. Its LED glow makes visibility’s
dependence upon energy difficult to ignore.

Pooja Iranna’s Symphony-4 and Sculptural Drawings 1 to 8 (2026) begin with a standardised fastening device. The staple pin is manufactured for closure, but Iranna repeats and joins it until fastening becomes structure. Curves rise like paired towers; grids thicken into facades; stepped forms approach pyramids, bridges and incomplete letters. The units are nearly identical, yet their accumulation produces different balances of density and void. Gestalt completion encourages the viewer to read buildings where no building has been represented in full. Shadow extends each shallow construction, making the wall part of its architecture.

Iranna has described her long use of staples in relation to mass-manufactured urban expansion and global architectural sameness. She also states that she fixes the staples herself with a special adhesive, working slowly without a preparatory drawing.[6] That account matters because repetition here is neither machine automation nor an anonymous effect.
Standardisation supplies the module, while sustained hand assembly introduces curvature, instability and difference. The works do not reveal every industrial history of the staple, but they refuse its prescribed scale. Their formal discipline is also their social argument: the same unit that promises efficient closure can be made to stage congestion, fragility and improbable
collective support.

Rakesh Patel’s Annexure 1 (2026) offers a productive resistance to this emphasis on legible chains of production. Its Corten steel planes, arcs, apertures and vertical members produce an asymmetrical structure in which mass appears to lean, brace and suspend itself. Cutting and welding are necessary to its construction, yet a fabrication history cannot account for the
sculpture’s poised imbalance. The eye moves between the weight of the plates and the openings that prevent that weight from becoming monolithic. Its syntax recalls engineering, lettering and architectural elevation without resolving into any of them.

The orange-brown surface is not a finish applied after form. Weathering steel develops an adherent rust layer through alternating wet and dry conditions, and orientation affects the texture of that patina.[7] Atmosphere therefore continues the sculpture, particularly when it is installed in a climate different from the workshop. Conservation faces an instructive dilemma. To arrest all
surface change would misunderstand the material; to allow unrestricted moisture could damage it. Annexure 1 demonstrates that formal autonomy need not mean isolation. Its balance commands visual attention, while air, humidity, handling and maintenance continue to determine the state in which that form can be encountered.

If industry offers one route into the exhibition, transmitted images offer another. Guruvinayak Singh Budhwar’s Under the Shadow of Guru (2025) constructs a densely layered world in oil paint. A forest encloses an architectural canopy, an elevated shrine or palace form and a pool around which boats have gathered. Vegetation presses against built structure. Scale is unstable, and the route through the painting is less perspectival than accretive. The artist describes the work as drawing upon Khmer, Rajput, Persian, Dravidian, Buddhist, Adivasi, Greco and Thai references.[8] Those references remain artist-supplied until particular sources are verified. What can be seen is an image that refuses a single architectural centre. Forms
seem to have travelled, been remembered and recombined.

This is not evidence of a universal spiritual grammar. It is a painting about the difficulty of isolating visual origin. The shaded canopy and contained water organise a protected centre, but the encroaching forest makes protection ambiguous. The title ‘Guru’ may name a teacher, an authority, a transmitted lineage or a condition of shelter. No devotional function should be assumed. The painting’s achievement lies in making cultural inheritance appear spatially
unstable: architecture is sustained by repeated images, but also overtaken by the environments into which those images move.

Tanmay Santra’s postcards and accordion book place transmission at the scale of the hand. A postcard is both a picture and apparatus of circulation, anticipating distance, address and compressed communication. The accordion book makes sequence dependent upon touch and display. It can be read page by page or opened into a temporary architecture. The terracotta
objects introduce a portability attached to fired earth, graspable scale and serial difference. No acoustic function is claimed. Appadurai and Kopytoff’s accounts of object biography are useful because status changes with situation: a sheet becomes correspondence, a sequence becomes
an exhibited book, and a handled clay form becomes a protected collection object.[9]

Myth also survives by changing status. Arunkumar H G’s Varaha (2023) gives the boar incarnation of Vishnu a body made from plastic waste, paper pulp, cement dust and epoxy. In established iconography, Varaha rescues the personified earth from cosmic waters.[10] Here the salvific body is itself composed from residues of production and disposal. The contradiction is
exact. Plastic waste is not absolved by artistic reuse, and epoxy assists preservation while binding heterogeneous refuse into a durable skin. The sculpture converts discarded matter into a collectible form, but it cannot reverse the systems that produced the discard. Its rough accretion makes that failure visible. Salvation is not represented as purity. It arrives as a compromised body carrying the conditions from which rescue is sought.

This places Varaha beside Waqif’s demolition works without making waste and displacement equivalent. Both begin from residue, but the politics of their residue differ. One brings a mythological image into contact with petrochemical and construction waste. The other translates a particular clearance through photography, software, machine cutting and a component of demolition equipment. Political ecology can locate their material consequences; iconology and legal history differentiate their claims. The exhibition’s task is to hold that difference rather than gather every remainder beneath a consoling language of reuse.

Shweta Mansingka’s three works redirect the exhibition from public infrastructure towards the social organisation of interiority. The Seeker comprises carbon-infused stoneware vessels with metal fittings arranged across a four-foot square field. Their orbital placement constructs an
unoccupied centre. Some appear closed or darkly recessed; others disclose irregular rims. The difference between emptiness and inaccessibility becomes important. An empty vessel promises available capacity. An opaque interior may refuse access altogether. Mansingka describes her practice through a search for what lies within and identifies herself as an ‘open bowled seeker’.[11] The visible installation, however, prevents that search from becoming a
private emblem. Multiple bodies organise seeking collectively around what is absent.

The kiln is decisive. Carbon, clay, heat, atmosphere and metal mounting do not simply execute a pre-existing image. Mansingka has worked with alternative firing since 2007 and describes smoke, flame and metallic salts as leaving distinct imprints upon unglazed surfaces.[12] Firing is controlled, but its outcome is not wholly programmable. The resulting blackness belongs to
chemical and thermal processes as much as to iconographic choice. Encountered phenomenologically, the dark vessels project from the wall while withholding their depth. A production map can clarify how opacity is made. It cannot exhaust the bodily uncertainty of facing a centre that is visually present because nothing occupies it.

Locked Vulnerabilities intensifies this relation between interior and access. Seventeen saggar-fired ceramic and wooden elements incorporate antique iron keys and metal fittings. The key is engineered for a precise correspondence between lock and access, yet the locks here are absent or displaced. Prior ownership, ageing and collection accompany the keys into the work, even though those biographies are not presently known. The fired ceramic surfaces record atmospheric variation; the keys retain the recognisable specificity of tools. One material registers contingency, the other promises mechanical certainty. Their conjunction turns vulnerability into an organised condition of protection, secrecy and exclusion.

The title permits an affective reading, but the installation should not be reduced to therapeutic disclosure. Locks and keys are also social technologies. They distribute access, establish possession and separate the authorised from the excluded. The wall arrangement produces a field rather than a narrative of seventeen individual emotions. Each element gains meaning through its interval from the others. As with Salik Ansari’s Altars of Absences (2025), spacing is constitutive. Ansari’s acrylic paintings on cutout wooden panels operate as a complete ensemble. At the 13th Berlin Biennale, the work was contextualised through punitive demolition and the concealment of its targets, with excavator jaws and rubble occupying irregular
frames.[13] The installation diagram, wall, curator and installer are therefore conditions through which separate panels become one work. If a collector detaches them, identity as well as display is altered.

Where Ansari constructs absence through dispersed fragments, Mansingka’s Arpan gathers relation into the closed form of the coconut. Round and elongated Raku-fired stoneware bodies carry crackled white and black surfaces with brass stems. The coconut is at once a botanical body, protective shell, portable commodity and culturally charged object. The title may mean offering, dedication or surrender, although the artist’s intended emphasis should be confirmed. The work represents the form of an offering; there is no basis for claiming that it performs a ritual function.

Marcel Mauss’s account of the gift is useful because giving creates obligation among giver, recipient and object, while Jacques Derrida presses the paradox further: a gift recognised as gift enters calculation, gratitude and return.[14] Arpan does not illustrate either theory. It gives them a material problem. The ceramic coconut cannot be opened without being destroyed. Its interior
is represented through enclosure, while its brass stem gives brittle clay the appearance of botanical continuation. As an artwork offered to view and available for acquisition, it moves among dedication, representation and property. What appears freely given may generate custodial and economic obligations.

Together, The Seeker, Locked Vulnerabilities and Arpan change Mansingka’s position within the exhibition. Vessel becomes installation, key becomes sign, coconut becomes ceramic form, and offering becomes collectible object. These are not steps in a linear ascent. They are changes of status that expose different relations among interiority, access and value. The Seeker asks how
a centre can be organised by absence. Locked Vulnerabilities asks who controls passage to what is concealed. Arpan asks what begins when possession is relinquished, represented as relinquished, or transferred under another name. Ansari’s ensemble prevents these questions from remaining private. Absence may be engineered by state force, protected by memory, and
subsequently stabilised by an institution.

The gallery is not the neutral terminus of these histories. Walls author spacing; pedestals isolate; labels turn uncertain associations into public statements; lighting selects surfaces. Ceramic is vulnerable above all to physical force, while porous or unglazed surfaces retain dirt and stain.[15] Cyanotype, LEDs and weathering steel require different care. Ansari’s ensemble needs an installation plan capable of surviving loans; Tanmay’s book must negotiate between handling and protection. Conservation decides which transformations belong to a work and which must be prevented.

Collection extends this decision. An object’s transfer into private or institutional ownership can secure care, research and future visibility. It can also turn a difficult web of labour, displacement and symbolic inheritance into a stable, scarce and marketable unit. Bourdieu’s account of the cultural field reminds us that artistic value is produced through positions, institutions and acts of recognition, not discovered as an intrinsic quantity.[16] This does not invalidate the work’s formal authority. It makes the conditions of that authority part of curatorial responsibility. The collector receives property, but also a burden of installation, documentation, conservation and ethical interpretation.

No Object Begins Here cannot recover a pure origin for any work. Materials do not preserve complete testimony, artist statements do not settle every meaning, and institutions cannot make every participant visible. The exhibition offers a disciplined incompleteness. It asks what can be established, what may be inferred, and where an object refuses the account constructed around it. The title names not an absence of beginnings, but their plurality. What enters the gallery has already been extracted, made, pictured, fired, damaged, transported, believed, handled and valued. What leaves will enter further systems of attention and possession. Here, the object does not begin. Here, another responsibility does.

-Satyajit Dave