Momentum

“...as in musical chairs when there’s one fewer seat than there are humans who need it, but so long as the music plays the number of seats is immaterial and everyone is still in the game. You have to not stop. You have to keep moving. You have this glorious orbit and when you’re orbiting you’re impact-proof and nothing can touch you. When the planet is galloping through space and you gallop after it through light and dark with your time drunk brain, nothing can end.”

Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Momentum is a condition. It is a vector: of force, of insistence, of movement that does not settle into stillness. Momentum invokes both physics and poetics—an insistence of a presence, an unfolding that resists inertia, refusing to be contained. Across histories, art has moved with such condition. Each epoch has produced its own avant-garde, propelled by urgencies both internal and external to art. The avant-garde has always been this condition of becoming: artists stepping into the unknown, generating new visual languages, and in doing so, redefining what art could be and whom it could speak to. That impulse, to test, stretch, and fracture inherited frameworks—interrogating identity, labour, ecology, memory, and power—in short, the very act of making, has today become inseparable from the question: what does it mean to produce art in a society that is itself in flux?

It is with such propulsion that this exhibition situates itself. The artists assembled here—Aman Kumar, Anshu Kumari, Ishita Patel, Jaimini Jariwala, Manaswini Balekkala, Shashikanta Mohanty, Shruti Parekh, Simran Yagyik, Soumen Ray, and Vatsya Padia—do not cohere around a singular aesthetic; there is no manifesto to bind them, no stylistic allegiance to navigate interpretation. Instead, what emerges here are open-ended practices that are vivid, political, reactive, and responsive. If there is a shared ground, it lies in a forward thrust that engages with the present as something continuously negotiated. By bringing together their diffused practices of drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, quilting, and sculpture, Momentum becomes a dynamic formation—fluid, contingent, and unresolved.

To call this a “new avant-garde” is, at best, incomplete: the exhibition does not assemble these artists in pursuit of novelty, but in recognition of a renewed urgency. It asks us to consider not what art is, but what it does; not what it represents, but how it moves. The works gathered here generate trajectories, lines of force that extend beyond the exhibition itself, inviting us to inhabit the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of the present.

Written and Curated by Shankar Tripathi

CURATED BY INTERSPACE AT 079 | STORIES