"This autumn, Ashvita’s presents the second iteration of Games People Play 02 by artist duo Thukral and Tagra at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, from 7 - 16 October 2025, marking 20 years of the duo’s collaborative studio practice.
Thukral and Tagra explore the idea of play as a psychological, social, political, and internal condition shaped by the anxieties of our present moment. Over the past two decades, their practice has engaged with questions of migration, displacement, and ephemerality through painting, archiving, gaming, and publishing.
Games People Play 02 is conceived as a playtest in exhibition-making, a curatorial gameboard that unfolds over ten days through ten works. Each day activates a new state, whether emotional (vulnerability, anxiety, hope, reverie) or structural/mental (belief, speculation, conjecture, adaptivity, resilience, care). Together, they create a shifting map where artworks are not static objects but move in play, growing with each day and transforming the rhythm of the exhibition. Visitors are invited to explore this evolving field, examining how feelings and processes interact and how, in turn, we influence the rules of the game.
The first iteration of Games People Play was presented in 2015 at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, conceived as an institute-as-arena for cultural reflexes, a lens to observe how we perform, negotiate, and perceive cultural matters.
In this edition, Thukral and Tagra stage new situations by drawing on strategies of relational art: a participatory format of public engagement. Within this space, viewers are invited to bring forth their hate and transform it into acts of care. The familiar game of ping pong is transformed from a pastime of competition to a site of reflection. Another work, Assets and Liabilities, reconfigures demonetised Indian currency into the surface of a table-tennis table, inviting viewers to play across the residues of a disrupted economy. Here, the game of table tennis becomes a metaphor for life and death, lullaby and lament.
Thinking through Eric Berne’s 1964 book of the same name, Games People Play, extends the idea of unconscious patterns of behaviour, roles, and strategies that shape human interactions. In Berne’s terms, these “games” are the subtle, often repetitive scripts people perform in order to negotiate power, attention, intimacy, or survival. Transposed into an artistic context, the phrase becomes a foundation to examine how such invisible rules play out across cultural, social, and emotional terrains — where performance, vulnerability, and resilience intertwine.
Through this foundation, the institution becomes an arena where games are reimagined as physical, mental, and spiritual, spanning past, present, and future. Reinvented by the artists, these works create experiences that are both playful and thought-provoking, immersive yet reflective. They open up multiple ways of seeing: inviting the viewer to step in as the protagonist to navigate, negotiate, and reflect on the shifting nature of their own participation within art as well as in the wider social and cultural landscape.
About the Artists
Thukral and Tagra are a Delhi-based artist duo comprising Jiten Thukral (b. 1976, Jalandhar, Punjab) and Sumir Tagra (b. 1979, New Delhi). Driven by the artistic methodologies of painting, gaming, archiving, and publishing, their multifaceted studio practice reflects the scope of engagement in the cultural and political landscape of India and the world. While their early career work dealt with the intricacies of consumer culture globally, their recent interest in ecology and climate change is a revisiting of their family histories of migration and farming in the Indian state of Punjab. Through and beyond their studio practice, Thukral & Tagra create new formats of public engagement and attempt to expand the threshold of what art can do.
They also curate Multiplay at the Serendipity Arts Festival, an immersive program of multi-sensory participatory installations designed to bridge gaps between audiences and exhibitions, making art accessible across diverse backgrounds and approaches while breaking away from conventional spectatorial protocols of high art."
Games People Play 02 will be on-view at Lalit Kala Akedmi, New Delhi, until 16th October, from 11AM-7PM.
Date 15-10-2025