'We carry them with us, these houses we once lived in. Not as photographs or floor plans, but as something deeper, an architecture that has quietly grown into the grain of memory itself. The way a particular slant of wall once held the light, the precise weight of a ceiling that pressed against thought, the rhythm of a corridor that taught us how to move through uncertainty. Even when the physical structures are altered beyond recognition or left far behind, their material imprint lingers: a stubborn, living presence that continues to shape how we inhabit the world. This exhibition begins from that intimate paradox.
The houses we almost lived in, those imagined, withheld, or glimpsed only in passing, are not separate from the ones we once called home. They are extensions of the same process: architecture as something that embeds itself in us, material and persistent, while the built world around us constantly shifts and erases. Houses I Almost Lived In gathers five artists who understand this slow, almost bodily colonisation of memory by form. Their works do not merely depict space; they enact the way architecture becomes part of lived consciousness, how it grows on us through touch, repetition, and time, surviving every demolition or departure.
Shalina Vichitra treats cartography as a personal archaeology of belonging. Her layered sculptures and imagined map paintings chronicle the fragile, ongoing production of place, where landscape and shelter merge into sensorial archives of what it means to remember or long for a home. Pooja Iranna works directly with the raw matter of cities, cement, pins, mirrors, lattices, building and dismantling grids that mirror the relentless cycle of urban construction and loss. Her sculptures expose how architecture, in its material frenzy, imprints on collective memory even as it erases older traces.
Raj Jariwala reorders maps and numerical systems into accumulations that question the distance between measured space and lived reality. His artworks and structures reveal how every act of ordering space carries emotional and political weight that settles, unbidden, into the mind. Samit Das excavates the architecture of silence itself, drawing from personal and historical archives to let material fragments speak of time’s quiet persistence. His works remind us that cities and buildings hold cultural and ecological memory long after their physical forms have changed or vanished. Mahen Perera extends painting into stitched, knotted, residual forms that carry the bodily trace of place. Through stretch, tear, and material leftover, his artworks become intimate records of how architecture leaves its mark on flesh and feeling alike.
What these practices together illuminate is not nostalgia for lost walls, but a deeper recognition: architecture is never merely external. It grows on us, enters the bloodstream of memory, and refuses to leave even when the houses themselves are gone, or were never ours to enter. In an age when cities are rebuilt faster than we can register their passing, these artists ask us to pause inside that persistence.'
Houses I Almost Lived In is on view at Latitude 28 until 25th May, 2026.
Words Platform Desk
Date 14.5.2026