To Make a Home with You, Curated by Mihir Thakkar, Art + Charlie, Mumbai
There is a hushed intimacy that comes alive when you enter To Make a Home with You. It doesn’t introduce itself with a grand flourish — it doesn’t have to. Instead, it greets you like a conversation between friends who’ve known each other forever. The exhibition, curated by Mihir Thakkar and hosted at Art + Charlie in Mumbai, delicately shifts the focus toward queer lives as influenced not only by identity, but also by the relationships that support, shelter and nurture.
The Architecture of Affection
What does it mean to construct a home, not merely with bricks of mortar, but with narrative, gestures, and emotional scaffolding? This exhibition doesn’t try to answer in sweeping statements. Instead, it finds the contours of home in tenderness, shared vulnerability and unspoken rituals of care. It is, at heart, about the people who get us to ourselves.
Through the work of five artists — Aksh Diwan Garg, Deepak Dhiman, Lakshya Bhargava, Namrata Arjun and Zoya Lobo — the show outlines a subtle, deeply felt vocabulary of queer intimacy and resilience. This isn’t a loud proclamation of identity. They’re gentle proclamations of survival, of community and of love forged in the margins.
Downstairs: Where Memory Lies
In the emotional sense, the gallery’s lower floor acts as a living room, a space where vulnerability is on display. The works here echo reckoning, reflection and re-rooting.
Deepak Dhiman’s intimate mixed media pieces, for example, provide a raw glimpse into the emotional landscape of coming out to one’s parents. There’s a bittersweet duality in his work: the pain of truth-telling and the bravery it requires of the mouth that utters it. His storytelling is specific but also universal, holding space for anyone who has had to explain their truth in the hope that they will be understood.
Along with Dhiman, the works of Aksh Diwan Garg and Lakshya Bhargava traverse gender and transition, as well as the invisible histories that mold queer bodies. There’s a feeling of shedding and stitching — of remaking oneself not as a reaction to violence, but as an act of affirmation of joy.
This section is about memory, not nostalgia, but active remembering. Each work speaks to the unspoken dialogues and ruptured relationships that often informed queer childhood and young adulthood. But instead of languishing in grief, these pieces talk of reclamation.
Upstairs, Togetherness binds us all?
If the downstairs rooms are congested with emotional excavation, the second floor blossoms with the newsprint-softness of chosen family. Here, the works start to reach outside at least a little — toward other people, toward joy, toward belonging.
In Zoya Lobo’s documentary photography captures moments of queer collectivity in public and private spaces. Her lens doesn’t exoticise — it dignifies. In her frames, queer lives are not spectacles but symphonies of intimacy, humour and quiet resilience.
Namrata Arjun’s installation and illustrations are alive with a pulse of domesticity and friendship. There’s a tactile quality to her work — a feeling of time spent over shared meals, between text threads or on rooftops beneath mango trees. These are not idyllic moments. They are lived, flawed and full — and therefore deeply human.
Upstairs, the exhibition puts itself at its emotional pitch: neither in declaration nor statement, but in embrace. It’s a reminder that queer thrive isn’t just rainbow flags and parades — it’s cups of chai exchanging between weary hands, phone calls answered at 2 a.m. and the possibility of being seen without having to explain.
Curating from Within
The curatorial voice of Mihir Thakkar is a steady presence throughout. His approach is not clinical or distanced; it’s lovingly engaged. The exhibition is less a survey of queer expression than a letter to and for community. “This show is an attempt to share the soft support that I’ve enjoyed in my own friendships,” he writes. And that intention reverberates from room to room to the next.
By centring the kind of relationships — platonic, familial, spiritual — it does, the exhibition purposely avoids voyeuristic or trauma-centred types of queerness. Instead, it constructs a home of warmth, messiness and laughter.” These are small-scale stories with tectonic impact.
Beyond the Gallery space: Community as Practice
To Make a Home with You doesn’t stop at the gallery door. It spills out into the city through collaborative programming with Gaysi Family and Gay Gaze Bombay. Via film screenings, reading circles, zine-making workshops and storytelling sessions, the exhibition stretches its central inquiry — what constitutes a home? —into a kind of real-time collective action.
“Everyone wants a home — for comfort, for safety,” adds Ayesha Parikh, founder of Art + Charlie. Though the show is informed by a queer perspective, the need it addresses is universal.” That universality is central: the show doesn’t ask viewers to decipher queerness, but to see themselves in it.
Living in the Now
What To Make a Home with You yields isn’t a single vision of queer life, but a constellation. There is no linear story here. Instead, there are textures of heartbreak and joy, of surviving and becoming, of solitude and solidarity. And at its heart is the radical notion that we deserve to be held, not despite our differences but because of them.
The exhibition never claims to define queerness. It trusts it. It invites it. And in doing so, it provides something rare: not representation, but relation.
In a world that constantly asks us to be resilient at the expense of softness, this show reminds us that tenderness is a kind of resistance. That care is radical. That friendship can be an act of politics. And that at times home can be as simple — and as profound — as making room for each other.”
Zoya Lobo Untitled edition of 5 2024 Photographs on semi archival paper, 12 x 18 inches. Credit-Art-and-Charlie.
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