At Artiform in Mylapore, Chennai, a new exhibition is placing material itself at the centre of artistic storytelling. Bringing together Kannan P, Mani Murugesan, Ramki Ravi, Ramesh N, Surya S and Yogeshwaran V, the show examines how wood, metal, graphite and paper can be transformed into carriers of memory, rather than treated merely as neutral artistic media.
The exhibition arrives at a moment when contemporary Indian art is increasingly attentive to process, texture and the social life of materials. In this context, the works on view do more than display technical skill. They suggest that the residue of making — the grain of wood, the resistance of metal, the pressure of graphite, the fragility of paper — can become a language for personal and collective remembrance. The result is a body of work that reads as both tactile and reflective, rooted in the physical act of construction while reaching toward emotional and historical depth.
Material as Memory
The curatorial premise of the exhibition is straightforward but resonant: materials are not passive supports for imagery, but active participants in meaning. Wood can evoke inheritance, craft and endurance; metal can imply weight, industry and permanence; graphite carries the immediacy of drawing and thought; paper suggests vulnerability, archive and trace. By working across these substances, the artists create a shared vocabulary in which memory is not illustrated so much as embedded.
That approach gives the exhibition a quiet conceptual force. Rather than relying on overt narrative, the works appear to ask how remembrance survives in surfaces, marks and alterations. A scratched line, a burnished edge or a layered sheet can hold as much emotional charge as a figurative scene. In that sense, the exhibition aligns with a broader shift in Indian contemporary practice, where material experimentation often serves as a route into questions of identity, labour and time.
Craft And Contemporary Practice
The presence of six artists also gives the exhibition a comparative dimension. Each artist brings a distinct relationship to medium, but the grouping suggests a common interest in transformation. The works are not presented as isolated objects; they form a conversation about how making can register experience. Some practices may lean toward drawing and mark-making, others toward sculptural or assemblage-based forms, but all appear to share an investment in the expressive potential of process.
This is significant in Chennai, a city with deep craft traditions and a long-standing visual culture that moves between classical inheritance and contemporary reinvention. Exhibitions such as this one help bridge that divide. They show that material intelligence is not a relic of older artistic systems, but a live and evolving part of present-day practice. By foregrounding wood, metal and paper, the show also resists the idea that contemporary art must be detached from handwork or tactile engagement in order to be intellectually serious.
The exhibition's emphasis on memory also gives it a wider cultural relevance. In Indian art, memory often operates across multiple registers: family histories, urban change, artisanal knowledge, and the afterlife of objects. Materials can hold these layers without needing to explain them directly. A surface can suggest erosion, repair or repetition; a form can imply use, abandonment or preservation. The viewer is invited to read not only what is depicted, but what has been done to the material itself.
Chennai's Quiet Art Pulse
Artiform's decision to host a show of this kind in Mylapore underscores the neighbourhood's continuing role in Chennai's cultural ecology. Mylapore is associated with tradition, ritual and dense urban memory, making it an apt setting for an exhibition concerned with transformation and recall. The venue adds a local anchor to a show that is otherwise expansive in its formal concerns.
For the artists, the exhibition offers visibility within a scene that increasingly values cross-disciplinary experimentation and material rigor. For audiences, it offers a slower kind of encounter — one that rewards close looking and attention to process. In an art market often driven by spectacle, the show's strength lies in its restraint. It suggests that the most durable stories may be those that emerge through touch, abrasion and accumulation.
As presented at Artiform, the exhibition is less a survey of finished objects than an argument about how art remembers. It proposes that materials carry histories before they are shaped, and that artists can reveal those histories by altering them with care. In that sense, the show is not only about what wood, metal, graphite and paper become, but about what they continue to hold.