A new group exhibition titled Space Making : Making Space in New Delhi, curated by interior architect Kunal Shah, brings together artists, architects, and designers to explore how space is conceived, built, and imagined across physical, social, and spiritual dimensions.
About the exhibition
Space Making : Making Space is a group exhibition presented by Gallery Art Motif in New Delhi, opening on 21 March and running until 25 April 2026. Curated by Mumbai‑based interior architect and exhibition designer Kunal Shah, the show gathers a diverse constellation of artists, architects, and designers whose practices intersect architecture, craft, sculpture, photography, and textile. At its core, the exhibition is an inquiry into how space operates—not only as built form but as social and spiritual terrain shaped by bodies, communities, and rituals.
The works move fluidly between disciplines, inviting viewers to consider the subtle negotiations involved in defining boundaries, creating enclosures, and reshaping environments. The title itself suggests a double gesture: the act of “space making” as both a technical and a poetic process, and the continuous effort to “make space” for different ways of living, belonging, and being seen.
Curatorial vision of Kunal Shah and central themes
Kunal Shah frames Space Making : Making Space as an exploration of “what it means to carve, claim, and consecrate space, across time, materials, communities, and species.” His curation emphasises that space is not only about what is constructed but also about what is imagined, felt, and remembered. The exhibition surfaces the ways in which drawing, stitching, photographing, and building all become acts of spatial negotiation.
The show unfolds across several interlinked themes: the architecture of everyday life, the spatial needs of non‑human actors, the ritual framing of sacred encounters, and the quiet improvisations through which people mark land and make place. By bringing together urban and rural, historical and contemporary practices, the exhibition proposes a layered understanding of space that is at once infrastructural and intimate.
Artwork by Percy Pithawala | Image Credit: Gallery Art Motif
Artists, works, and highlights
Among the participating practitioners, RMA Architects present Hathigaon, a habitat for elephants and their mahouts that foregrounds the spatial needs of non‑human and interspecies inhabitants, expanding who and what architecture is made for. Delhi‑based Stem Design Studio contributes aluminium models that abstract components of the domestic realm, offering minimal yet evocative gestures toward the architecture of daily life.
Painter and sculptor Pooja Iranna interrogates our perception of volume through urban geometries, using meticulous stacking, flattening, and layering to stage an endless, laborious making and unmaking of urban space. Baroda‑based Maitreyi Desai drafts tight, measured grids that slowly evolve into emergent forms, visualising how control and intuition meet in the act of spatial delineation.
Mumbai‑based architect Dr Percy Pithawala upends conventional structure with deconstructivist architectural drawings rooted in Russian Suprematism, suggesting that instability and energy are latent in built forms. Photographer Indrajit Khambe captures rural ingenuity, documenting how farmers repurpose old saris to demarcate fields—acts of marking land and making place from what is at hand.
Japanese textile artist Chiaki Maki defines space through fabrics that allow permeability, echoing the chilman or chik, the Indian curtain that historically negotiates privacy and visibility. Architect Tilak Samarawickrema translates architectural plans and elevations into tapestries, softening rigid geometries from stone to textile, so that their lines become tactile and open to interpretation.
The sacred dimension of space is invoked through vintage prabhavalis—ornate ritual frames that create sanctified enclosures for deities—as well as the lime‑plastered chini khaanas of Araish, which evoke the quiet spaces we create for objects. Shalina Vichitra’s sculptures probe questions of belonging through both tangible and intangible aspects of space making, asking how interiors, thresholds, and voids shape identity and memory.
Artwork by Araish | Image Credit: Gallery Art Motif
Exhibition Details
- Title: Space Making: Making Space
- Artists: RMA Architects, Maitreyi Desai, Stem Design, Pooja Iranna, Araish Jaipur, Indrajit Khambe, Chiaki Maki, Percy Pithawala, Prabhavali, Tilak Samarawickrema, and Shalina S Vichitra
- Curator: Kunal Shah
- Venue: Gallery Art Motif, A1-178 Safdarjung Enclave, Fourth Floor, New Delhi
- Dates: 21 March – 25 April 2026
- Hours: 10 AM – 6 PM
This article has been created from the press kit shared with Abir Pothi. For press releases and related queries, write to editor@abirpothi.com.
Cover image: Pooja Iranna | Amalgamation | Image Credit: Gallery Art Motif
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
