Latitude 28’s new home is not simply a container for art. It is a stage where meaning is continuously produced. The gallery is imagined as a site of dramaturgy, where bodies, materials, light and time unfold in choreographed tension. Its long sightlines, strong beams, modular false walls and natural light are not neutral elements but active collaborators in shaping experience. In this inaugural exhibition, Dramaturgies of Space, eight distinct practices, Firi Rahman, Sudipta Das, Salik Ansari, Monali Meher, Juhika Bhanjadeo, Chandan Bez Baruah, Waswo X. Waswo and Riyas Komu, activate the architecture not as a backdrop but as a partner. Together they inaugurate the gallery as a living stage where South Asian contemporary practices generate new scripts of seeing, moving, and dwelling.
The idea of space as performance has been central to performance theory, particularly in the work of Erika Fischer-Lichte, who reminds us that performance is transformative precisely because it places the spectator inside the act rather than outside it. The visitor in this exhibition is not passive. They cross thresholds, voids, and suspensions, walking beneath Sudipta’s fragile paper figures cascading from above, detouring around Chandan’s carved landscapes, or pausing before Firi’s ecological drawings unfurling across the walls, confronting Komu’s politically charged figuration that transforms the gallery into a site of dialogue and dissent. The gallery itself performs. Its false partitions, beams, and windows fold into the dramaturgy, creating an environment where architecture and artwork together choreograph how we move and feel.
Michel Foucault described heterotopias as spaces that mirror, juxtapose, and destabilise other realities. The modern art gallery (especially the white cube) is one such cultural invention: a space devoted to art, removed from ordinary functions. A gallery gathers works from multiple geographies, times, and contexts and places them side by side. It collapses now and then, performing the heterotopic function of juxtaposition: bringing together what is otherwise scattered. The gallery becomes such a site in this exhibition. Waswo’s staged miniatures summon colonial histories as playful fictions, while Juhika’s layered fragments open intimate psychological interiors. Each practice becomes a heterotopia within the gallery, unsettling the often presumed neutrality of the white cube, whilst inviting visitors to reconsider what a gallery can hold.
South Asian thought offers another lens through which to understand the spatial dramaturgy of the exhibition. Here, space is never inert but textured by migration, ecology, hybridity, and myth. Rustom Bharucha has argued that performance is always intercultural, a crossing of thresholds. It resonates the notion of raṅgabhūmi, a stage that carries cosmological and social charge. Further, the raṅgabhūmi, in classical Indian thought was a sacred charged site where worlds overlapped (cosmic, social, emotional). It offered an opportunity for reciprocal encounter, where the artwork “looks back”, and architecture participates. Movement itself becomes poetics, through the visitor’s journey of thresholds, corners, and light scripted as an unfolding drama. The interplay of works of the 7 artists the gallery becomes a palimpsest of geographies folded into a single dramaturgical script.
Dramaturgies of Space opens Latitude 28’s new chapter by affirming that exhibitions are more than displays of objects and ideas. They are choreographies of attention and encounters where architecture, theory, and artwork and audience co-produce meaning. This exhibition is at once spectacle and reflection, fiction and material, archive and anticipation. It declares the gallery not as a container but as a stage, where contemporary practice generates new ways of inhabiting space—politically, poetically, and performatively.
– Curatorial text by Satyajit Dave
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