In its 15th edition, Emerging Palettes returns to Srishti Art Gallery in collaboration with Goethe-Zentrum Hyderabad, presenting young contemporary artists who are pushing the boundaries of material and memory. Selected from over 300 entries, this year’s 11 participating artists explore diverse mediums ranging from textiles and ceramics to steel, wood, and video installation. They craft textured narratives rooted in identity, belonging, and transformation.

The final lineup — Aaryama Somayaji, Deepanwita Das, Farhin Afza, Hasan Ali Kadiwala, Manu N (Manushya), Moumita Basak, Nayanjyoti Barman, Nirmal Mondal, Pathik Sahoo, Vishnu CR, and Yogesh Hadiya — was chosen by a jury comprising Amit Kumar Jain, Varunika Saraf, Jaiveer Johal, and Lakshmi Nambiar, who also helms Srishti as founder and curator.

This year’s curatorial focus, Pushing Boundaries of Materiality, is compelling. The show highlights how artists are thinking beyond canvas and conventional form, and engaging with textiles, ceramics, steel, found objects, and video. From narratives in stitched installations to the reuse of discarded materials, each practice becomes a dialogue between form and idea, reminding viewers that the material can become a narrative force.

Inbuilt memories by Nirmal Mondal
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

For Nirmal Mondal, a graduate of Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, that narrative emerges from clay. Working in Santiniketan, he draws on the terracotta temples of Murshidabad and the dwindling craftspeople who once built them. “My work is a way of conserving the stories I grew up with,” he says, adding, “Ceramic holds memory better than paper.”

Manu N (Manushya), who studied at the Bengaluru School of Visual Arts and Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, blends industrial and natural materials to explore the vulnerability and endurance carried in both Nature and the human body. In his stainless steel Inflorescence, floral structures form branching clusters and patterns. The artwork reflects his interest in botanical systems and the small-scale industry he runs. Meanwhile, his organic, coral-like forms stem from a desire to create works that “symbolise the creation of life.” He explains, “Salt and terracotta symbolise land and ocean. That duality reflects where we come from.”

Farhin Afza, who received her MVA in Graphic Arts from University of Hyderabad in 2024, anchors her multimedia work in the rituals of Muslim domestic life. Her piece Dastarkhwaan reimagines the everyday dining spread as a political site. “My work explores ideas of home, memory and identity,” she says. “It is personal, at the same time political.” Incorporating everyday domestic objects, video, and textiles, Afza’s work speaks softly but forcefully to belonging and marginality.

Aaryama Somayaji, who holds a B.Des from National Institute of Design, Andhra Pradesh, and an MA in Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, creates dreamlike works rooted in folklore, oral traditions, and imagined memory. Her Heirloom Recipe Chart series is in acrylic wash and watercolour pencil on banana-fibre paper she made a decade ago. Her work is a “maximalist approach to abstraction” and explores the language of recipes as cultural inheritance. “They are sort of gestures or whispers that are told to you as recipes… add a little bit of this, a little bit of that,” she explains. A culmination of ingredients, approximations, and even gaps where history has erased memory or left space for future generations to fill in themselves.

Entity by Deepanwita Das
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Other featured artists present equally potent material narratives. Deepanwita Das evokes botanical decay and emotional vulnerability through layered lithographs and stitching. Hasan Ali Kadiwala offers quiet, poetic etchings around displacement and spiritual longing.

Moumita Basak uses recycled textiles and embroidery to reflect on gender and ecological justice. Nayanjyoti Barman builds fragile assemblages from plywood and wire to explore migration and memory in Northeast India. Pathik Sahoo works with iron, brass, and tin to reconstruct vanished rural festivals and communal rhythms. Vishnu CR transforms wood into large-scale sculptures inspired by carpentry traditions and childhood puzzles. Yogesh Hadiya layers satire and metaphor into dense woodcuts championing social critiques.

(Emerging Palettes 15 is on view at Srishti Art Gallery, Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad, till July first week)