LATITUDE 28 presents The Personal is Mythical, curated by Bhavna Kakar, a group exhibition featuring new bodies of work by Bhajju Shyam, Neha Sahai, and Viraj Khanna. The Personal is Mythical examines how contemporary artistic practices in India are engaging with and reorienting the mythic—not as a static or folkloric residue of the past, but as an insurgent mode of storytelling. It serves as a meditation between private memory and collective imagination. Positioned within a long-contested field of cultural production, the exhibition confronts entrenched hierarchies that have historically produced binaries such as 'folk' and 'high' art, 'craft' and 'concept,' and the 'vernacular' and the 'global.' In doing so, it asserts the capacity of myth to function as a living site of knowledge production, shaped by contemporary concerns and rearticulated through diverse artistic languages.
Foregrounding the work of Bhajju Shyam, Neha Sahai, and Viraj Khanna, The Personal is Mythical resists reductive taxonomies and instead presents an embodied, polyphonic articulation of artistic practice. The exhibition does not propose a homogenous fusion of indigenous and contemporary forms, but rather a strategic engagement with the socio-aesthetic exclusions that have marginalised non-canonical practices within dominant art discourses. It consciously avoids a simplistic celebration of hybridity for its own sake. Instead, it insists that the lineages of image-making in India—whether drawn from tribal, artisanal, or urban contexts—possess both conceptual depth and aesthetic vitality, and that their modes of narration are acts of memory, resistance, and invention.
Bhajju Shyam, a leading figure within the Pardhan Gond tradition, constructs intricate visual cosmologies that honour ancestral knowledge systems while remaining attuned to the exigencies of the present. His work operates simultaneously as preservation and provocation—insisting that oral storytelling and visual inheritance are dynamically evolving rather than fixed in time.
Neha Sahai, by contrast, inhabits a more introspective and surreal terrain, employing watercolour, ink, and oil to depict liminal feminine worlds where memory, stillness, and dream converge. Her reimagined goddesses and moonlit figures defy patriarchal idealisation, asserting instead a tender, radical femininity rooted in embodied poetics and emotional intelligence.
Viraj Khanna’s practice draws from the overlapping domains of textile, performance, and post-pop collage. His use of masks, stitching, and fragmented forms speaks to the constructed nature of identity itself, suggesting that selfhood—like myth—is performative and contested. Khanna interrogates the very notion of the 'authentic' as it has been shaped by consumer culture, modernity, and inherited ideologies.
Through these divergent yet dialogic practices, The Personal is Mythical articulates a curatorial framework that honours difference without instrumentalising it. It refuses to reduce the 'traditional' and the 'contemporary' into binary oppositions and instead posits the mythic as a critical methodology—one that enables artists to grapple with rupture, reclaim marginalised histories, and forge new iconographies. The exhibition contends that myth, far from being a retreat into fantasy, functions as a grammar for reworlding through memory, resistance, and transformation.
By centering these artistic vocabularies, The Personal is Mythical offers a powerful counterpoint to hegemonic art histories and affirms the urgency of reclaiming narrative sovereignty within an extractive cultural economy.
“With The Personal is Mythical, we’re not just presenting three distinctive artistic voices — we’re interrogating the very lens through which art from India has been historically viewed, categorized, and consumed. Bhajju Shyam, Neha Sahai, and Viraj Khanna are rewriting visual narratives by pulling from memory, myth, and identity — not as spectacle, but as selfhood. This exhibition challenges the binary between folk and contemporary, traditional and conceptual. It reminds us that what is personal can also be political, and what is rooted can still be radical.
As a gallerist, editor, and art historian, my engagement with contemporary art extends beyond exhibitions to fostering critical discourse and research. Through Latitude 28 and TAKE on Art, I have worked towards creating platforms that support emerging voices in art and writing. Initiatives like the Art Writing Award reflect this commitment, enabling new perspectives to shape the evolving art landscape. I am particularly excited to see how this exhibition will contribute to a renewed appreciation of their work and open the world of intellectual curiosity about the inevitability of art in society. Along with the technical dexterity of their works, the exhibition is a profound recognition of the incisive social and cultural commentary that underlies the surface of each painting.” – Bhavna Kakar, Founder-Director, LATITUDE 28
About the Artist
Bhajju Shyam
Bhajju Shyam (b. 1971) is a celebrated Gond artist whose practice inhabits a richly layered space between tradition, personal memory, and living myth. Hailing from the forested village of Patangarh in central India, he developed his distinctive visual language under the mentorship of Jangarh Singh Shyam, transforming inherited forms of Gond painting into cosmopolitan narratives alive with movement and meaning. Shyam’s work extends the storytelling roots of his community into contemporary contexts, conjuring intricate cosmologies where animals, spirits, and humans coexist in symbolic harmony. His acclaimed The London Jungle Book reimagines urban landscapes through Gond iconography, rendering travel itself as a form of myth-making. Through meticulously patterned surfaces and vivid organic forms, Shyam collapses the boundary between the remembered and the dreamed, the local and the universal. His practice resonates with a lineage of artists who have redefined indigenous visual traditions as dynamic, evolving vocabularies, crafting personal yet collective histories that speak to transformation, resilience, and the enduring power of narrative.
Neha Sahai
Neha Sahai’s (b. 1985) practice occupies a luminous intersection between autobiography, myth, and memory. Drawing from design and narrative traditions, her work conjures a visual folklore of quiet surrealism, where moonlit fish women, star-gazing moths, and cross-species romances unfold in still, dreamlike spaces. Emerging at 33 into painting as her primary language, Sahai’s practice resonates with feminist explorations of self and interiority. Her recurring Fish Woman figure, often draped in sarees and immersed in solitary rituals—reading, resting, or gazing into distant worlds—functions as a mythic double or alter ego. In these soft, sensorial landscapes, Sahai collapses distinctions between the remembered and the imagined, the personal and the archetypal. Her work aligns with a lineage of artists who have used figuration and myth to explore identity and interiority — from the narrative intimacy of Bhupen Khakhar, to the feminist poetics of Paula Rego and the introspective sensuality of Amrita Sher-Gil. Like them, Sahai weaves the deeply personal into visual vocabularies that transcend the self, creating spaces where memory becomes myth.
Viraj Khanna
Viraj Khanna (b. 1995) is an Indian artist whose practice explores the theatrical construction of identity through layered, narrative-rich forms. Working across sculpture, textile, and mixed media, Khanna mines popular culture, fashion, and inherited iconographies to create visual tableaux that question the nature of selfhood and social performance. His works conjure a stylised world of fragmented bodies, ornate costumes, and playful symbolism, staging scenes that oscillate between sincerity and irony. Figures appear at once mythical and contemporary, evoking ritual, masquerade, and spectacle as sites of both concealment and revelation. Khanna’s practice resonates with artists who interrogate cultural myth-making and personal history through figuration. In these intricate, often ambiguous compositions, he blurs the boundaries between the handmade and the mass-produced, the traditional and the hyper-modern, offering viewers a reflective space to consider how identities are imagined, performed, and transformed.
Words Platform Desk
Date 28-07-25