towards minor gestures: intensities in the making

Showcasing the 10 recipients of the Emerging Artists Award 2024 (EAA+)

towards minor gestures
intensities in the making

An exhibition showcasing the 10 recipients
of the Emerging Artists Award 2024

Preview: 7 July | 6pm onwards

Exhibition Dates:
8 July - 7 August 2026
10 am - 6 pm | Mon - Sat
at Vadehra Art Gallery, 
D 53 Defence Colony, New Delhi

Participating artists: Ashis Dhali | Ashis Kumar Palei | Bhikari Pradhan | Kiran Mungekar | Rahee Punyashloka | Richa Arya | Ritika Sharma | Partha Banik | Soumava Das | Vipin Dhanurdharan with Untitled Kitchen

The exhibition is a critical part of the EAA+ programme that builds engagement with young artists within a peer-led model of dialogue, exchange, mentorship and making. As the cumulative point of the forum, the exhibition serves as a space to gather all of the explorations, convergences and relationalities that have emerged from the shared cohort experience into a collaborative, collective articulation. The practices within this exhibition span engagements with various registers of image-making and image encounters, different forms of space-making, research and documentation-based outcomes, as well as discursive, participatory encounters. The exhibition will be presented alongside active programming through a variety of artist interventions, workshops, and dialogues.

Within the aegis of this show, we are drawn to the different ways in which practices hold themselves in movement, mapping the shifts of its internal rhythms and inclinations, tuning into the forces that sit within the interstices of its many possibilities. The exhibition considers what it means to think in relation with one another and come together in active inquiry. It reads this field as continually incipient, active with tendencies and agitations that hold the potential for different affective coordinates for perception and experience to come into being. It is interested in temporary ruptures, interruptions, punctuations, and ephemeral ripples that stretch and inflect the fabric of experience, allowing for leakages, accumulations, and intensities to generate new resonances for articulation.

Guided by Erin Manning’s notion of the minor gesture, the exhibition wishes to consider the different ways in which practices hold themselves in movement, mapping the shifts of its internal rhythms and inclinations, tuning into the forces that sit within the interstices of its many possibilities—gently orienting us towards probable conditions for encounters with the ineffable, the more-than, and that which is felt before it is known. For Manning, it is the indeterminacy and speculative potential of the minor gesture that generates an opening for difference to be articulated. She writes, “The event and the minor gesture are always in co-composition, the minor gesture punctuating the process, moving the welling event in new and divergent directions that alter the orientation of where the event might otherwise have settled." (Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press Durham and London, 2016)

We are grateful to all the artists for their participation and for the thoughtful works produced for the exhibition.

The EAA+ platform has been made possible in collaboration with the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation.  We also thank our Residency Partner Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation. We are grateful for the support of Vadehra Art Gallery towards the making of this exhibition. 

To access the press release, click here.
To read the full curatorial note, click here.