We live in interesting times. A time when myths tend to take the place of history, a nuclear holocaust is casually invoked, riots are accepted, hate is normalised, and technology is the new religion. If art is a form of the mind’s reflection on itself and its surroundings, then the exhibition “Reverie. Pause. Rupture” (April 2 to May 20), curated by Gayatri Sinha at the new space of Anant Art Gallery in Safdarjung Enclave, New Delhi, shows a post-apocalyptic world. It unfolds in monochromatic images, photographs, and objects interspersed with blinding canvases that come almost as an attack on the senses.

One bright spot—the melodious strain of an old Hindi song drifting out of a darkened area—turns out to be from a short film by Ranbir Kaleka about the 2002 Gujarat riots. The venue itself is highly industrial, and within it, the exhibition presents a world filled with objects rather than with people; solitary burdens, both physical and mental; individual labour; riots; destruction; and regeneration. What binds the works together is not stylistic affinity but a shared preoccupation with states that are difficult to articulate: the drift of thought, the necessity of stillness, and the force of rupture.

Sinha posits her engagement with the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s writings on reverie at the core of the exhibition. “The show arises from my own concerns about what the creative process is. It implies the ability to dream. For this I went to Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie where he speaks about imagination and what the artistic imagination is. Bachelard gives the highest place to the dream-like state, or, one might say, the state which every individual has but which is frequently never expressed. There is no space for it in the everyday. And Einstein thinks it is a waste of time.

“But if it’s a waste of time, then where does the artist really create from? A pause is important also because you need that time in between to create ideas of how to address life. And rupture is particularly important because this is really the state of return. Rupture can be violent and break processes. This can be with earthquakes or war. It can be with tears, and it can be within the psychological state of an entire social policy. The most important thing is that it contains the seeds of the future. Something breaks, but within that lie the seeds of the future. That’s why the show ends on a quite positive note,” Sinha said.

The three terms—reverie, pause, rupture—denote a cycle rather than a sequence. Pause is the condition necessary for both contemplation and creation, and rupture is the force that interrupts and transforms.

The show opens with charcoal drawings by the artist and filmmaker K.M. Madhusudhanan. Speakers and gramophones repeatedly appear in them, portraying communication as a charged, frequently manipulated force rather than as neutral transmission. Information impacts societal knowledge by creating narratives of civilisation, culture, and power, whether it is distributed through print, digital, or audio media. Skeletal birds, hybrid animals, and disjointed allusions to myth and history mingle in the 16 canvases. The result is disjunction, reflecting the fragmented character of modern dialogue.

In Madhu Das’ photographic works, the issue of labour and its visibility, invisibility, and representation comes up. A working-class man is placed in an interior, nearly staged space. By being so placed, he brings out the dichotomy between lived reality and its artistic presentation.

Materiality plays a crucial role here. The contrast between the hyper-detailed human figure and the rough, almost schematic rendering of wooden supports underscores a separation between body and structure, labour and its scaffolding. The use of textured Nepali paper further complicates the visual field, introducing a tactile dimension that resists the slickness of digital reproduction.

“These were created in 2017 during a residency in Goa. I wanted to create something new in photography by engaging with memory, space, the identity of the space, and the material itself.... When I heard the title of the exhibition, I connected to it immediately because everything is related to states of being like pause or rapture, which indicate what one goes through mentally as well as well how that is reflected in everyday life,” Das said.

Next to Das’ work are Gigi Scaria’s videos set in a hive-like wooden structure that show the places Scaria visited as they were and as they are now. They engage with the rapid transformation of landscapes under the pressure of development. Forests give way to concrete; natural rhythms are replaced by infrastructural logic. The rupture here is both physical and conceptual, a break in the relationship between human habitation and the environment. The question that lingers is whether such a rupture can ever be reconciled with sustainability, or whether it leads to further fragmentation. Across the room, Scaria’s monochromatic painting of a Tetris-like Tower of Babel shows how a lack of understanding of each other’s language and motives causes destruction.

Rupture and survival

A moment of humour comes with Vasudha Thozhur’s painting of a laptop eaten by termites that she created after retiring from teaching. Ranbir Kaleka’s Windows (2002) is a short film about a neighbourhood that goes from romance to riots, as seen through small wooden slats on gates. Despite its topic, it evokes a nostalgia for a time when riots were shocking.

Across the gallery, Shakuntala Kulkarni’s huge charcoal images called Collective Grief evoke Bertolt Brecht and Margarete Steffin’s famous play, Mother Courage. The drawings evoke migrant figures, women navigating precarious urban spaces, bodies marked by labour and displacement. These are not heroic figures but resilient ones, caught in a continuous negotiation with their surroundings. The ambiguity of their identity—are they from myth, history, or the present?—underscores the cyclical nature of rupture and survival.

Placed next to this are Lavanya Mani’s brilliant textile and paint canvases. In one of them, a fiery orange cloud bursts across a barren sky, suggesting ecological contamination. Her Parasite shows biological and psychic eruption.

Anju Dodiya’s small-scale works help the exhibition turn inwards, exploring the intimate rhythms of daily life. Drawing from the format of miniature painting while remaining firmly rooted in the contemporary, Dodiya makes the domestic sphere a site of introspection: of waking up, waiting, eating, marking time. The artist’s body appears vulnerable, fractured, caught between states of rest and anxiety. These are not grand narratives but quiet accumulations of experience that take the viewer from the global to the personal.

“Reverie. Pause. Rupture” is the second exhibition to be held at the new, ambitious space of Anant Art that opened in January 2026. The 22-year-old gallery was formerly located in Noida. Mamta Singhania, founder-director of Anant Art, said: “After nearly two decades, Anant Art renews its collaboration with curator Gayatri Sinha. From early exhibitions such as ‘Middleagespread’, ‘Found Objects’, and ‘Mutant Beauty’ between 2004 and 2008 to ‘Reverie. Pause. Rupture’ in 2026, this partnership traces a significant arc in the gallery’s history. Gayatri returns with a deeply conceptual framework that engages with the complexities of the human condition: time, its movements, its ruptures, and its lingering memories. The exhibition arrives at a pivotal moment for Anant Art, with the gallery’s return to New Delhi on an expanded scale, marking both a continuation and a redefinition of its curatorial journey.”

Aban Raza’s works showing the streets of Delhi and Noida in the wee hours quieten the viewer’s nervous system a bit by evoking moments of pause. Baiju Parthan’s almost steampunk painting shows a huge vessel/machine that takes us to another land, if we get the equations right.

And this brings us to Prajakta Potnis’ multimedia works conjuring up the global crisis, displayed at the end of the space. Wooden rain-filled clouds falling on earth, and grey-toned landscapes evoke existential anxiety, climate change, and the fragility of human existence. The sky—depicted as a slate-like surface—becomes both shelter and threat. Interiors and exteriors blur: a hospital bed appears in a landscape, a landscape is contained within a room. The effect is disorienting, reflecting a world in which boundaries between the safe and the unsafe, the inside and the outside are increasingly unstable. A video of a man’s leg moving uncontrollably shows the unending anxiety that has become a bodily condition for us.

Next to it hangs B.V. Suresh’s bright red and saffron work showing a mannequin lying over a school, under which lies a child, surrounded by flag-carrying groups. Valsan Kolleri’s sculptures remind us that it is in stillness that the Seed of the Earth (also the name of one of his works)—the Vedic concept of hiranyagarbha or the golden egg that pre-existed the universe—rises from the waters. Riyaz Komu’s installation, India Report 2026—Manufacturing, shows a charkha turning slowly behind frosted glass while a nearby 3D printer produces imitation “archaeological” pots in plastic.

“These are very difficult times… deeply troubled times. However, the art scene has been very safe and market driven. It’s obvious why one should do a show like this. The exhibition emerges from a need to engage with ‘the ground’—both the physical space of the gallery and the social, political, and economic conditions that shape contemporary life, like labour, etc. This is not an abstract concern but an urgent one. I think it’s important to address these times; otherwise, I won’t have an answer when I look back at Indian art in 30 years and ask how this reflects on the world and what I saw,” Sinha said.

“Reverie. Pause. Rupture” is not a comfortable exhibition. It is not meant to be beautiful in any conventional sense. Instead, it confronts the viewer with the complexities of contemporary existence: its anxieties, contradictions, fragile hopes. It demands attention, patience, and a willingness to dwell in ambiguity. Ultimately, the exhibition suggests that to inhabit this moment fully, one must embrace all the three states of the title: allow oneself the space for reverie, recognise the necessity of pause, and confront the inevitability, but also the potential, of rupture.

Ritika Kochhar is the founder of ArtRadio, an art-based podcast, and the author of four books that look at myth and gender.

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