Convergences: A Shared Ground — Lineages, Practices, Futures : A Satellite Exhibition of the 7th Edition of KCC’s Annual Symposium, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam

Participating Artists/Collectives 

Convergences: A Shared Ground — Lineages, Practices, Futures is conceptualised around artistic practices and ideas from the eastern and north-eastern regions of India, navigating a continuum of cultural, artistic, craft, and architectural traditions. At a moment when inherited ways of making are increasingly fragmented or displaced, the exhibition turns to convergence not as a theme but as a method. Moving beyond a mere survey of objects or spaces, it explores the framework of production itself as an extension of embodied knowledge, shaped through deep relationships with land, ecology, and communal practices. 

The idea of convergence is taken as a strategic model to understand practice as a shared ground. Here, convergence does not imply sameness, but the coming together of distinct lineages through shared processes of making. These practices resist the flattened postulates of modernity and progress by foregrounding continuity, transmission, and care over rupture or novelty. What emerges is not a unified aesthetic, but a shared ethic of working with what already exists. 

This shared ground becomes visible most clearly in material choices. The use of bamboo, thread, natural dyes, earth, and fibre is not incidental, but an ethical and cosmological decision, embedding the work within a web of biotic relationships and seasonal cycles. These practices challenge the separation of culture from nature, proposing instead a mode of world-making rooted in conscience and sustainability. Across these practices, certain gestures recur with insistence. Repair, reuse, and remembrance move through the intertwined worlds of art, craft, and architecture. Together, these acts form an ethos and aesthetics of making. To repair is to tend to what is broken with care, binding fragments without erasing their wounds. To reuse is to extend the life of materials, carrying forward their textures, scars, and histories into new forms. To remember is to hold knowledge across generations, resisting forgetting in an age that privileges the new over the enduring. Making here is never only an act of invention, but equally an act of continuity. 

The everyday textures of life in the eastern and north-eastern regions of India reveal most vividly these acts of care. These practices express a cultural language in which impermanence is not an ending but a transformation, and fragility is met with resilience. Knowledge is absorbed through lived experience, seasonal rhythms, and sustained engagement with the natural world. Here, innovation emerges not from rupture, but from accumulated experience and adaptation. 

Bringing art, craft, and architecture into dialogue, the exhibition foregrounds practices that embrace both vulnerability and persistence. It asks us to see value not only in what is whole or new, but also in what has been mended, reimagined, and carried forward. In this sense, convergence becomes not only a shared ground but a way of tending to/staying with the world.