Blueprint12 at Art Mumbai 2025

For the 3rd edition of Art Mumbai, Blueprint12 brings together a constellation of South Asian voices whose practices navigate between the material and the metaphysical, the intimate and the collective. The presentation explores how artists reimagine language, memory, and identity through acts of repetition, repair, and resistance. 

Artists on show include JK, Kaimurai, Kingsley Gunatillake, Mansha Chhatwal, Meghana Gavireddygari, Musa Mojahid, Visakh Menon, Youdhisthir Maharjan and Zoya Choudhary.

JK is an artist whose practice interlaces personal memory, queer identity, and collective longing with quiet urgency and luminous grace. Emerging from the lush landscapes of Chanani, Jammu, artist JK weaves the essence of nature, community, and queerness into a vibrant, socially conscious practice. Now based in Delhi, his work reflects a deep concern with the fragmentation of social life in the urban metropolis, where homes stand like islands, and conversations across difference are scarce. His paintings respond to this disconnection by cultivating visual narratives that foreground empathy, belonging, and the right to visibility.

Drawing from his lived experiences straddling rural and urban India, JK addresses the barriers, both concrete and metaphorical, that inhibit meaningful relationships across communities. In his compositions, vibrant colours are not simply aesthetic choices but metaphors for diversity, resistance, and radical joy. His use of luminous palettes becomes a counterpoint to the greyness of isolation, proposing colour as a language of solidarity. A self taught artist, JK recently participated in Delhi Contemporary Art Week 2025.

Kaimurai, an identity through which Abishek Ganesh J expresses his art and research practice. His work, executed in natural indigo, is a dialogue between organic forms and flow of energy experienced in the Western Ghats, Ancient South Indian art, rituals, architecture and Carnatic music. He captures raw energy and inherent vibration that is omnipresent but buried by daily chaos. Repeated markings (from fine strokes to large brush strokes) are seemingly calm and yet aggressive are characteristic to the organic nature of his work.

Kaimurai’s practice is triggered by three elements - a combination of Material (Natural Indigo), Organic forms (real or fantasised) and Carnatic music. He adds, ‘My mind wanders in the fantastical jungles of ancient past with life in abundance, strange formations and is informed by the mysticism of Carnatic music. It is a meditative process, an interaction between the Physical and metaphysical. My hands take control over my mind, creating repeated markings, a method which renders the artwork.’ He lives and works from Bangalore, India.

Kingsley Gunatilake is an award-winning visual artist and university lecturer with 18 years of teaching experience. Since his first solo exhibition in 1981, he has held over 24 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 48 notable group shows. His work has earned him numerous international and national awards, including two NOMA Awards from Japan and an illustration award from the Biennale Illustration Bratislava in Slovakia. In 2001, he received the Bunka Award for his exceptional work at Sri Lanka's Temple of the Tooth world heritage site. Kingsley's artistic expertise spans painting, installation, illustration, mixed media, sculpture, and video art, with a particular emphasis on vibrant, abstract paintings. Recently, he has explored 'book art,' treating books as visual objects. A pioneer of installation art in Sri Lanka, his acclaimed Year Planner installation is a testament to his innovative approach. Kingsley lives and works between Colombo and Kandy, Sri Lanka.

Being an ardent reader, Mansha Chattwal’s current works are focused on the subject of book burning as a way of looking at our past and recent history. Her work engages with issues of censorship, power, identity, memory and loss through stories of books, writers and libraries. With her research based practice, Mansha understands the various perspectives of storytelling that explores different angles, forms and concepts. Materials are employed to add a tactile layer that either add to the idea or stand at odds to it. She likes her work to be immersive, and encourages viewers to read beyond its visual qualities, identifying the books that have become the source of her inspiration.

In her current series ‘Brave Pages’, Mansha focuses on libraries and the books within them, which were attacked and burnt due to religious orthodoxies or political conflicts. The series of works is inspired by candle marches that take place after a tragedy occurs. These marches are an act of healing, solidarity, a hope for action and freedom of speech. She focuses on pages from books that have been burned or censored, now embalmed in wax to narrate the stories of their writers and cultural genocide. The wick of a candle and the smell of beeswax also remind us of the deep, almost religious reverence we humans have always had for books. Mansha is based in Mumbai, India.

Meghana Gavireddygari (b. 1996, Anantapur, India) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes materials like metal, wood, cement, and clay. She received her MFA in interdisciplinary fine arts from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (USA) in May 2020. Her practice is informed by her undergraduate education at Boston University, where she received her Bachelor’s degrees in Economics and International Relations. She explores the subject matter of territory, censorship, and colonization, amongst other themes in the larger spectrum of Indian politics and sociology. Most recently, she is exploring the political implications and connotations of Indian materials such as textiles, spices, and tea. She lives in Hyderabad, India.

Mojahid Musa an art practitioner from Bangladesh has completed M.F.A in Sculpture at Institute of Fine Arts, University Of Chittagong, 2015 after completing bachelor’s degree in Sculpture from Institute of Fine Art, University Of Chittagong, 2014. Recipient of national and international award and grants, Best Award of Sculpture, Sculpture Exhibition, Sculpture Network Presents, Germany 2016, 2017. Samdani Art Awardees Grant and exhibition, Dhaka Art Summit 2012 and 2023. Best Award of Sculpture and Instalation, 22nd and 19th Young Artists Art Exhibition, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy 2017, 2014. Grant at Home Art Project by Brihatta Art Foundation, 2020. Artist Rashid Chowdhury Award “Grand Award”, Annual Art Exhibition, Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong 2012, 2017.

Over the last decade, Visakh Menon has been exploring the impact of human-machine interaction over one’s perception. His meditative and repetitive practice focuses on the visual language of digital artifacts and the aesthetics of glitch, error and noise. Compositionally these works are inspired by geometric abstraction and color field paintings, the process transitioning from digital to traditional mediums of drawing and painting. The algorithmic aesthetics of these works pushes into focus both the functional (generative) and dysfunctional (glitch) nature of code as a tool for expression.

As efficient flow of information has become essential for the exchange of ideas, social interactions and political discourse in our networked society, his signal series of drawings explore concepts of structure and hierarchy as informed by the diagrammatic representation of command and control modules often seen in electronic systems, social networks, botnets, neural circuits, genome maps etc. These works are also influenced by his interest in non-traditional graphic musical scores & representation of sound visually. He lives and works in New York.

Youdhisthir Maharjan (b. 1984) creates artworks deeply rooted in language, blending reclaimed materials and text through a labor-intensive, repetitive, and autopoietic process to generate new meanings. Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—a play without a definitive beginning or end—Maharjan grappled with its cyclical, unresolved narrative. Drawing from his Buddhist and Hindu sensibilities, he likened this repetition to the endless cycles of rebirth and reincarnation, a journey with neither a starting point nor a conclusion. This sense of futility became the cornerstone of his artistic practice, expressed through acts of cutting, erasing, painting, burning, and weaving.

Maharjan's fascination with language can be traced to his undergraduate studies in creative and experimental writing, during which he often scavenged thrift stores for books—not just to read but to engage with as objects of subconscious exploration. These texts eventually found their way onto his printing press, where the act of repeated printing stripped language of its inherent meaning. Words dissolved into abstract forms, transcending the constraints of language to become universally resonant. He lives and works from Boston, USA.

Zoya Chaudhary is an artist born in India and a resident of Singapore since 2011. She works across mediums including installation, video, cut-out collage & painting. Zoya’s art practice is focused on exploring ideas of perception, memory & time especially in this media informed world. Her works begin with the personal, and then build to consider ways the personal interacts with larger public narrative. Zoya graduated with an MA in Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts in partnership with Goldsmiths, University of London in 2021. She has worked as a visual artist and illustrator in India and Singapore. Zoya spent her formative years watching, performing and designing for several theatre productions which she believes also informs her art practice. Her art has been exhibited and collected in Singapore and abroad since 2012.

Blueprint12’s presentation at Art Mumbai will be on-view at Booth C53, Mahalaxmi Racecourse Mumbai, on November 13th to 16th.

Date 14-11-2025