Cartographies of Mischief reflects the unruly geographies of the artist’s studio at a moment when space itself has become precarious, insistently political, and portable.
“Cartographies Of Mischief” at Akar Prakar in collaboration with Ether Project, from 29th November 2025 to 19th December 2025
In continuation with our show “Everybody’s Elsewhere” in Indore last month which seeked to capture multiplicity of places, memories, and imaginations that each of us carries, suggesting that community is never singular but formed through the overlapping of many “elsewheres.”; “Cartographies Of Mischief” investigates the fluid threshold where home becomes a studio and the studio folds back into home, reshaping how the contributing artists inhabit and imagine their own personal worlds. With a sense of whimsy and exploration, through works that map terrains, architectures, and lived interiors, the exhibition reflects on spaces that hold both comfort and constraint as sites of belonging, yet also of negotiation.
This exhibition looks into the fluid threshold where home becomes a studio and the studio folds back into home. As homes and studios shrink within contemporary urban economies, these overlapping geographies reveal both comfort and constraint. Through the works of Asma Kazi, Aditya Chadar, Cyrus Penuganti, Purnima Yaduvanshi and Supriyo Karmakar, that map terrains, interiors, and the architectures of lived experience, the exhibition explores on how these artists inhabit, imagine, and reshape their worlds. Autobiographical in nature, their practices reveal studios that function not only as physical spaces but as method, material, and sites of subtle mischief, where personal life and artistic intention blur into one. In her mixed media paintings, Asma Kazi draws microscopic landscapes from her training in zoology, and the contained environment of her home. Observation becomes a method of wandering, allowing her studio-home to unfold into imagined terrains. Aditya Chadar turns to his everyday life in Indore, where the community is both grounded and fragile. His experience of discrimination transforms into colourful, optimistic dreamscapes that imagine a more unified world. For Cyrus Penuganti whose upbringing was shaped by his life in Andhra Pradesh, shifts after moving cities toward a layered inquiry into emotional and physical presence. His studio becomes the epicentre of this evolving inner geography through his marble sculptures. Whereas, Purnima Yaduvanshi positions home as both dwelling and escape. In her surreal landscapes, fragments of memory that are lost, blurred, and renewed intersect within her new home-studio, where mixed feelings of belonging and departure coexist. Supriyo Karmakar renders the everyday architectures of textile layering through his meticulous drawings on paper. Textiles that are protective, intimate, and structural, become a lens for understanding the lived environments that shape him.A collaboration between Akar Prakar and Ether Project, Cartographies of Mischief complicates the assumed neutrality of studios as a production site. It presents the home-studio as a theatre of friction, restlessness, and possibility, where the everyday becomes the ground of artistic becoming. This exhibition asks not only where art is made, but also how spaces of making shapes the work. ~Yash Vikram
