ROOM WITH A VIEW

Notes from the Delhi Contemporary Art Week, that showed a new way of transforming the traditional white cube into an art-home, reframing how we view and live with art. Check out the new works that tap into today's zeitgeist.

- ADITHI REENA AJITH

AT Bikaner House's LTC, art climbed bookshelves, slipped into wardrobes, settled in bathtubs, and even peered from the edge of a tailoring machine. This is "Taqiya Kalam', curated by Priyanshi Saxena with Amrita Guha and Joya Nandurdikar of Untitled Design a highlight of this year's Delhi Contemporary Art Week (DCAW), which unfolded this weekend with six participating galleries.

The trio rebuilds the traditional white cube into a collector's home, presenting art in a lived-in setting. It is less about displaying artworks and more about staging life itself. "One of the reasons why we created this space is because you are meant to hang around with the artwork," Saxena says, explaining how the show dissolves the line between domesticity and display. Visitors are encouraged to sit on couches beside the paintings, flip through cookbooks, and even sample charcuterie arranged in corners with chips and dips.

Labels and explanatory wall texts are absent by design.

"We are too used to reading the wall before reading the visual. Here, I want people to learn how to read art itself," she adds.

Bookshelves are fitted with cookbooks, political theory, catalogues, and photography books, their surfaces disrupted by framed canvases nailed directly onto the shelves-a way of challenging the neat separation between literature and visual art. "We treat books as food for the mind, and art as food for the soul-why must they be divided," Saxena notes.

The preview, featuring artists from city-based galleries Blueprint12, Exhibit 320, Gallery Espace, Latitude 28, Shrine Empire, and Vadehra Art Gallery drew a steady crowd. Guests debated the works over champagne, drifted between rooms, or paused to listen to the acoustic performance staged outdoors by CCA.

Here are some of the presentations that caught our eye.

Queer intimacies in a bathroom