Art Across The City: The Exhibitions Opening This Weekend In Mumbai

Mumbai Gallery Weekend once again turns the city into a dense, walkable constellation of ideas, materials, memories and urgencies. With openings unfolding across Colaba, Kala Ghoda, Bandra and beyond, this edition brings together a striking range of voices and practices, from emerging artists to established names, solo exhibitions to carefully curated group shows. If you are planning to spend the weekend moving between galleries, lingering longer than intended, or discovering unfamiliar spaces, this is the perfect moment to do so. From meditations on urban transformation and collective memory to deeply personal explorations of emotion, identity and perception, here is a considered list of exhibitions currently on view across Mumbai that are well worth building your gallery trail around.

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'A Map Folded Open'

Sabeen Omar, Urna Sinha, Mahen Perera

Art and Charlie, Bandra

8 January – 8 February 2026

A Map Folded Open brings together three artists whose practices revolve around movement, memory and the act of tracing. Rather than presenting geography as something fixed, the exhibition treats mapping as an emotional and bodily process shaped by touch, repetition and lived experience. Sabeen Omar works with found and discarded textiles, transforming them into layered surfaces that hold traces of domestic life, labour and intimacy. Her works carry a quiet sense of accumulation, where material becomes a repository of personal and collective histories. Urna Sinha moves between painting and photography, focusing on sites marked by absence, grief and waiting. Her images feel suspended in time, attentive to small details that hold emotional weight. Mahen Perera’s sculptural works are rooted in gesture and form, capturing moments of tension between presence and retreat. Together, the exhibition unfolds like a loosely held map, where paths overlap, memories blur and the viewer is invited to navigate without a fixed destination.

'The Collective Memory of Contemporary Change'

Chippa Sudhakar

Tao Art Gallery

8 January – 12 February 2026

Chippa Sudhakar’s solo exhibition at Tao Art Gallery reflects on the rapid transformation of landscapes shaped by development, migration and economic pressure. Working primarily with terracotta alongside materials such as soil, wood and metal, his works draw attention to the uneasy coexistence of the rural and the urban, tradition and progress, nature and construction. Having grown up witnessing the shift of land from agrarian spaces to urban sprawl, the artist approaches these changes with sensitivity rather than spectacle. The exhibition foregrounds how land carries memory and how displacement leaves lasting emotional and psychological imprints on communities. Sudhakar’s surfaces feel worked and weathered, echoing both erosion and resilience. The exhibition invites viewers to slow down and reflect on what is gained and what is lost in the name of growth, while considering how these transformations shape collective experience over time.

'Becoming UnBecoming'

Santosh Kumar Das

Artisans’ Gallery, Kala Ghoda

8 January – 25 January 2026

Becoming UnBecoming is a deeply imaginative body of work that draws from childhood memory, ritual and the fluid nature of identity. Santosh Kumar Das’s practice is rooted in the visual language of Mithila painting, yet shaped by contemporary art discourse and personal reflection. The exhibition explores transformation as an ongoing process rather than a fixed state. The works move fluidly between the real and the imagined, blending traditional motifs with introspective narratives. Through intricate surfaces and symbolic forms, the exhibition creates a space where mythology, memory and self-invention intersect. Becoming UnBecoming invites viewers to reconnect with the imaginative freedom of childhood while reflecting on how desire, belief and transformation continue to shape who we become.

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'Cityflix'

Ranjit Kandalgaonkar

Fulcrum, Kala Ghoda

8 January – 14 February 2026

Cityflix documents the fleeting, often overlooked moments that quietly shape urban life. Ranjit Kandalgaonkar focuses on in-between spaces and transient gestures that emerge within the city’s constant movement. These are moments that may appear incidental but reveal deeper truths about how cities function and adapt. Through carefully framed visual fragments, the works capture pauses, fractures and shifts that occur between larger events. Bodies respond instinctively to changing surroundings, while environments themselves transform in subtle ways. Cityflix presents the city as something continuously unfolding, where temporary structures and gestures briefly expose their inner logic before disappearing. By isolating these moments, Kandalgaonkar builds a portrait of the city that feels intimate, unstable and quietly revealing.

'Have We Forgotten How to Feel?'

Rachita Dutta

Chemould CoLab

8 January – 19 February 2026

Rachita Dutta’s exhibition brings emotion to the forefront in all its unruly, awkward and unresolved forms. Working primarily with hand embroidery and textile-based assemblages, Dutta explores feelings that are often suppressed or left unspoken in adult life. Everyday symbols such as balloons, candles and melting ice cream become carriers of emotional tension and memory. Drawing from her upbringing in Jammu, where embroidery is a deeply rooted craft tradition, Dutta treats stitching as both a tactile and emotional language. Have We Forgotten How to Feel? creates space for vulnerability, reflection and emotional recognition, encouraging viewers to reconnect with feelings often pushed aside.

'Lone Runner’s Laboratory'

Prabhakar Pachpute

Experimenter, Colaba

8 January – 21 February 2026

Lone Runner’s Laboratory presents an immersive environment that grapples with power, vulnerability and the ethics of witnessing. Prabhakar Pachpute uses sculpture and installation to explore how individuals navigate systems marked by control, exploitation and violence. Drawing from the natural and animal world, Pachpute uses symbolic figures to examine instinct, survival and moral choice. The works suggest a constant negotiation between fear and resilience, observation and action. Rather than offering clear answers, the exhibition holds viewers within a series of unresolved questions about responsibility, empathy and complicity. Through stark forms and carefully constructed scenarios, Pachpute invites viewers to sit with discomfort and consider how hope might still emerge within fractured systems.

'Double Consciousness'

Lubna Chowdhary

Jhaveri Contemporary

8 January – 21 February 2026

Lubna Chowdhary’s Double Consciousness explores the experience of hybridity through ceramic forms that balance structure and sensuality. The exhibition brings together recent bodies of work that combine geometric precision with richly layered glazes. These works operate on multiple registers, engaging both intellectual and sensory responses. Chowdhary’s practice reflects a life shaped by multiple cultural contexts, and the exhibition considers how identity is formed through this constant negotiation. The ceramic surfaces draw viewers in through colour and texture, while the forms themselves suggest systems, pages or architectural fragments. Double Consciousness positions hybridity as a generative force, one that allows for complexity, contradiction and liberation. The exhibition invites viewers to experience art as something that is simultaneously legible and felt, structured and fluid.

'What Do Birds Dream at Dusk'

Mithu Sen

Chemould Prescott Road

8 January – 21 February 2026

What Do Birds Dream at Dusk is a multi-layered exhibition that examines blindness as a social and political condition rather than a physical one. Mithu Sen challenges the idea of seeing as a neutral act, drawing attention to what is deliberately obscured or erased. The exhibition unfolds across darkened spaces, disrupted pathways and performative elements that unsettle the viewer’s sense of orientation. By limiting visibility and introducing alternative modes of navigation, the works ask viewers to confront their own dependence on sight. References to historical imagery and contemporary politics are woven into a narrative that reflects cycles of denial, repetition and collapse. The exhibition encourages unlearning and discomfort, creating an experience that lingers long after leaving the gallery.

'Brobdingnag Paradox'

Pratap Morey

Tarq

8 January – 21 February 2026

Pratap Morey’s Brobdingnag Paradox returns to the visual language of construction and urban growth through large-scale photographic collages. Built from sustained observation of construction sites across the city, the works play with scale, repetition and spatial compression. From a distance, the compositions appear orderly and monumental, while closer inspection reveals fragmentation and instability. Morey reflects on how redevelopment often promises progress while producing sameness and disorientation. Shiny surfaces and repeating forms echo the seductive aesthetics of urban expansion, while subtly exposing its monotony. The exhibition mirrors the psychological experience of navigating a city where movement does not always lead to change. Brobdingnag Paradox offers a critical lens on how constant building reshapes both physical environments and mental landscapes.

'A Painter with a Camera'

Jyoti Bhatt

Subcontinent

8 January – 21 February 2026

A Painter with a Camera highlights Jyoti Bhatt’s experimental approach to photography as a material and conceptual practice. Created between the 1960s and 1980s, the works on view reveal a sustained engagement with analogue processes such as multiple exposure, collage, masking and hand painting. Bhatt treats the photograph as a surface to be reworked, altered and revisited, drawing from his background as a painter. Presented as silver gelatin prints, the works retain their original material presence and labour. Through fractured images and layered compositions, Bhatt explores perception, identity and visual language. The exhibition situates his practice within a broader history of experimental photography in India, offering insight into a period of innovation and boundary-pushing.

'Gardens of Song'

Maya Burman

Art Musings

8 January – 21 February 2026

Gardens of Song presents a lyrical selection of works by Maya Burman spanning the past seven years of her practice. Her paintings are densely patterned, filled with figures immersed in moments of play, music and movement. Drawing from both European and Indian visual traditions, Burman creates lush, dreamlike worlds where nature and human presence merge seamlessly. Floral motifs, birds and dancers populate her compositions, creating a sense of rhythm and joy. The works reflect a life shaped by multiple cultural influences, as well as the quiet influence of the small French town where the artist lives. Gardens of Song offers a gentle pause within the city, inviting viewers into spaces shaped by imagination, memory and abundance.

Mumbai Gallery Weekend offers a rare opportunity to see the city’s galleries come alive at the same time, each presenting its own distinct point of view. From material-led practices and political reflections to quieter, more personal exhibitions, there is a wide range of work to engage with. As you plan your routes across neighbourhoods and gallery floors, allow time for detours and lingering. The city’s art landscape right now is expansive, thoughtful and deeply engaged with the world it inhabits.

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