Alexander Gorlizki | Ayushi Patni | Balan Nambiar | Claudia Wieser | Desmond Lazaro | Elisa Deane | Genevieve Chua | Jethro Buck | Karen Köhler | Mahirwan Mamtani | Nicole Frobush | Olivia Fraser | Prabhakar Barwe | Shane Drinkwater | Sohan Qadri | Shobha Broota | Tanya Johnson

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Consider a single note, floating in space.

What happens if one breaks it down further—the note into vibration, the vibration reduced to a point, the point held as a Bindu? These graphic notations—circles, points, grids, and pulsating geometries—are not merely formal devices. They are propositions: ways of thinking, sensing, and entering states of inwardness. In visual terms, this anatomy is shaped through repetition, movement, and focus, where form evolves, gathers, and returns to a point.

This mode of working takes shape within a significant post-1960s movement in Indian modern art, when abstraction became a site of renewed enquiry rather than stylistic alignment. For a number of artists, reduced geometries and restrained palettes offered a way to think through form without recourse to narrative or representation that functioned as visual pathways to meditation, attunement, and the dissolution of binaries. Central to this inquiry is the Bindu, not as a symbol, but as an organising principle: a point of origin, tension, and return.

This profound turn towards inwardness was propelled by a critical realisation among artists of the 1960s and 1970s. While the Bindu sits at the core structures of tantric cosmology and philosophical order, it was approached simply as an iconography, but as a mode of ‘knowing’ that translated into form through a deep, individual thought process. ​This translation became urgent due to encounters with dominant western modernist languages, many of which carried a residue of colonial impositions/ hierarchies, highlighting the limits of the tantric iconography and its abstraction grounded solely in external paradigms.​ Movements such as Cubism, Expressionism, and Constructivism revealed the limitations of abstraction grounded purely in external form, underscoring the absence of pluralistic philosophy. Thus, the artist began to retreat deliberately, in search for structuring this very understanding that could hold both thought and sensation. Turning inward, therefore,  became a way for the artistic agency to articulate concentration, return, and internal coherence through a distinctly nuanced, layered and internal conceptual framework. For many artists, in their search for a personal artistic mantra and distinct grammar, Tantric artistic practices emerged not only as revivalism, but also as a necessity for self-exploration and a culturally grounded response to exoticisation.  Within this context, the ‘Bindu’ offered a rigorous mode of ‘knowing’ translated into form, rather than a belief system to be illustrated.

Such interiorised systems, including the idea from which the ‘Bindu’ derives, had long been marginalised within colonial and early modernist frameworks, dismissed as irrational, or pre-modern. Even within Indian cultural discourse, they were often relegated to the occult or the fringe, complicating the reception of artists who critically engaged with these visual languages. To work with the Bindu through abstraction was therefore a decisive act: a refusal of inherited hierarchies and an assertion that inwardness itself could legitimately organise modern visual language.

This engagement with the Bindu, rooted in tantric ways of knowing yet articulated through contemporary abstraction, continues in the present exhibition. Here, artists move beyond expressionist strategies toward a more concentrated, receptive, and resonant visual language, rendering the Bindu as a potent artistic and intellectual proposition rather than a symbolic motif. It further proposes a shift in how these lineages are understood today. In this context, the note as inscribed as the Bindu functions as a generative tool: a structural spine through which multiplicity unfolds and collapses, offering ways to negotiate the psychic, spiritual, and material tensions of contemporary life—what Stella Kramrisch described as “the metaphysical hunger of modern man.”

While anchored in South Asian visual and philosophical lineages, the exhibition remains transnational and cross-disciplinary in its outlook. ​It brings artists from global spheres who answer enduring questions about the relationship between Tantra and contemporary Indian art—questions that move beyond iconography toward method, discipline, and inner orientation. ​​This creates a collective document of how Tantric philosophy and practice informed the evolution of abstraction in India.

Ultimately, it asks: what if the very cultural forms of knowledge once objectified or marginalised could be reclaimed as tools for freedom—capable of dismantling rigid ways of seeing and opening new possibilities for perception, agency, and redefinition?