Taqiya Qalaam At Delhi Contemporary Art Week

Taqiyaa Qalaam presents a bold curatorial vision by Priyanshi Saxena, reconfiguring the boundaries of art display at Contemporary Art Week 2025. Designed by Amrita Guha and Joya Nandurdikar of Untitled Design, the exhibition transforms the gallery into an evocative collector’s home, dissolving the divide between art and everyday life. Visitors are invited to traverse intimate, domestically inspired settings where conceptual works resonate with the rhythms of lived experience, fostering deeper engagement and reflection. Priyanshi spoke to us about curating this ahead of the preview. Exceprts below.
 
To begin with, can you talk about the importance of space in art?
There is a disconnect between the larger audiences who want to engage with the arts in India and how the art exhibitions are made in India. There's a different dance to how one engages with art galleries. This segregation of art, design and craft is actually something that was done by colonizers; by people who actually didn't necessarily understand a lot of what art is in South Asia. So, I figured that if one needs to make it into bite-sized commercial commodities, then one has to actually replicate the kind of life that one lives. So, that is how I started re-looking at art and how to show it.
I started with this project called I Am in Surat where I worked with art markets in tier two cities to create micro fairs. And within that, we figured that, if you have these very sternly white cube format booths of art, a lot of people were not very interested in engaging with it. And even if they come and they nod their head but weren’t really digesting much of it. So we tried to create something more familiar in the visual of it. To create a homespace in our Art Fair. That made it  easier for the audience to imagine how a work of art will look within their home.
It did extraordinarily well in Surat. And since then, my art practice has been centered around the idea of how do I make art exhibitions that are one, entertaining, because I truly believe art is a medium of entertainment. And two, they're in a language where larger audiences can understand and engage with it.

Can you talk about a little about how did you approach Taqiya Qalaam and what was the starting point?
I conceptualized the kind of art I want to show and how I want to show it and then we got these fantastic interior designers, Amrita and Joya of Untitled Design. They are very good at placing a lot of the artworks that we see within a lot of the galleries in DCAW. So they're very familiar with how people like to consume art. It's just that you're putting that on a commercial platform.
Taqiya Qalaam, the term is something that's existed in South Asian vocabulary for over like eight hundred years. We coined it that because it is a reaction to what people are thinking and saying and talking about. And it is actually a reaction to the Taqiya Qalaams of today. If one looks at my curatorial practice, you'll see that I generally navigate within this space of reacting to words in the street and how social milieu are growing, not growing, fragmenting, all of that.
So the idea is that one looks at art trying to understand certain structures within the social settings a little better.
 
And what was your curatorial process for the art that coexists in this designed space?
I know most of the artists in most of these galleries. They're also just great friends. So for me, that was also one of the things that I saw a leitmotif between certain practices. Like, I had to use artists from all of the six galleries that are exhibiting. There was a lot of practices within some of these galleries that I really respected and I've never been able to engage with them curatorially. Say, for example, with Vadehra, we have Sunil Gupta. Like, I'm genuinely somebody who loves his practice and the kind of work he's done. If I look at Indu Antony from Blueprint; she is a very good friend. I know her practice inside out, and I really respect it. So for me, it was literally bringing together practices that I really look up to and the leitmotif among all of them.
And there can be multiple lenses of looking at this: the way I've looked at it is how most of them are responding to a certain sort of reactions or affections to the society. And I brought it together through Taqiya Qalaam.

What was the conversation you had with Amrita and before you started work on it?
It's an art forward exhibition. I had about three quarters of the artworks because they were made in the past. Say, for example, Sunil Gupta's work, or an older body of Indu Antony's work. I'm using some pretty old works of Nandan Ghiya.
And then there were just certain contexts with some of the artworks that I had to sort of outline. And then it was free reign with Amrita and Joya saying that how can we put it in the LTC at Bikaner House and make it look like different spaces in a home. And then they came back with some incredible suggestions. It was really interesting to see how Amrita and Joya actually envisioned some of these works. It was phenomenal. You'll be actually surprised to see some of the artworks in certain contexts that Amrita and Joya have put, which is very different from how these artists have been shown in a larger sort of curatorial or art form forward practice.
It’s really nice to see Amrita and Joya bring a new meaning and a new life literally to artist’s practice through the way they've used it. I’m very excited about a few works like with Waheeda. With a few artists I had a certain point of view of how the work should be presented. And then for some, it was just an exchange that went between us.

Any closing thoughts?
An artist makes an artwork. And there's generally a story behind it but there is a larger meaning to a work. But once the artwork leaves the artist's studio, it's an independent bird. It can fly wherever it wants to.
But at the end of the day, if there is a viewer, a buyer, a collector wants to actually put up the art upside down in their house, it's perfectly all right. Like it's an artwork that they perceive a certain way. It's however you want to live with it, it's an object at the end of the day.
I come back to my statement, why are we being so over serious about it? Even though this entire show is looking at conceptual practices, there's a lot of meaning and momentum in each of the works that I'm putting out. But at the end of the day, the artworks will go into homes that have lived ideas that are far broader than that one practice or whatever, one artwork that we're pushing forward. And we have to let that be. I'm taking the artwork from the artist with the responsibility that I've presented in the best possible light. But I urge everybody coming to view it, to buy, to even hang out with art. If you take it to your home, it's yours to have as much fun as you want with it.
There have been times where the artists has been pleasantly surprised with how we’ve put out their work because they never envisioned it like that. There is no right way to show art as long as we're just honoring the work.

Words Hansika Lohani 
Date 29-8-2025