5 Exhibits You Shouldn’t Miss During Mumbai Gallery Weekend, 2025

Shailee Mehta’s Chants from the Hollow shows bodies and landscapes as they intertwine in quiet acts of repair. Through delicate pencil sketches and evocative oil paintings, Mehta captures the fluidity of the feminine—figures leaning, bending, and resting in domestic moments of renewal. She bring a softness to each canvas, tracing the contours of intimate relationships and wild leisure. With a verse built on the backs of colour, form and the female gaze, the artist offers a meditative exploration of continuity and care.

January 9 – February 22, 2025

With BRAIN ROT, Viraj Khanna spins the Oxford Word of 2024 into a striking critique of modern living. Through textiles, sculptures, and collages, he captures our social media-fuelled routines, questioning: “The Life You Live?”. Each piece demands space, both literal and mental, to peel off its intricate layers of satire and detail. As the son of designer Anamika Khanna, the artist draws on his deep, familial ties to embroidery and textiles, using boldness, absurdity, and vibrancy that culminate in an uncomfortably familiar selection of works. With this exhibit, he holds up a mirror to our online personas while prompting us to look closer—at ourselves and the worlds we create.

January 9 – February 9, 2025

In his upcoming exhibition, Christopher Kulendran Thomas presents a series of paintings that seem to physically distort the human form. One particular piece depicts a figure seemingly caught mid-motion, with limbs bent in unnatural directions and additional limbs emerging from the bottom of the canvas. The cadmium yellows, fiery oranges, and streaks of pink juxtaposed with aquamarine under-layers create a visually arresting image. In his video works, Kulendran Thomas uses AI to depict a hallucinatory blend of real and fabricated narratives. Resting on a larger commentary on Sri Lanka’s fractured history and colonial past, the artist leaves viewers with the unsettling tension between digital creation and human gesture.

January 9 – February 22, 2025

Santiago Giralda, a Madrid-born artist, returns to Galerie ISA with Maps of the Invisible, an exhibition whose creative treatment of landscapes uses classical fine art techniques along with digital technology. Using these tools, Giralda creates highly detailed canvases that explore nature’s relationship to the urbanised, screen-driven world. Using photographs as a base, his work evolves through editing software, yielding landscapes that are at once familiar and impossible. Similar to Exhale, the fragmented, dreamlike imagery craftily oscillates between the physical and the virtual.

January 9 – February 22, 2025

With scale as her trusted tool, Prajakta Potnis transforms the night sky into tangible forms through slate paintings. Evoking the weight of darkness while reflecting the fractured landscapes below, Potnis interrogates the intimate intersections between human suffering, and the vast, indifferent sky. Possibly the most jarring parts of her work, are those which portray trauma, not as an abstract concept but as an animate, tactile force, manifesting as mould, roots, or a festering wound, that distorts domestic spaces. The exhibition, inspired by an equally visceral poem of the same name by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, speaks to a world shrinking under the burden of crises and political turmoil.

January 9 – February 28, 2025

Visit Mumbai Gallery Weekend’s website for more details and information on other events.