TRAVELLING EXHIBITION

Emergent Practices in South Asia

The travelling exhibition Emergent Practices in South Asia, 2026 documents seventy-eight emergent architectural practices across South Asia engaged in architecture, landscape, and infrastructure in the public realm. Structured in three sections: Reframing South Asian Geographies, Portfolio of Practices, and Patterns of Practice, creating a platform for dialogue among practitioners and highlighting the region’s plural modes of practice.  The exhibition represents a comprehensive survey of the South Asian architectural landscape, offering insights into emergent concerns, methodologies, technologies, patronage, and models of practice. It considers how humane and social aspects of architecture in a landscape of transitions are being approached by architects today.

The exhibition curated by Devashree Shah, Pranav Thole, and Rahul Mehrotra has travelled across South Asia since its inaugural showing of forty-one practices in New Delhi in December 2023, subsequently showcased at Bengaluru and Chennai in 2024, and Kochi, Kozhikode, and Karachi in 2025, growing through each stop into the seventy-seven practices represented in the 2026 Mumbai edition. Upcoming venues include Kabul and Boston. At each location, local curators contribute to and build upon the exhibition's intellectual framings, introducing a diversity of curatorial approaches and expanding the lenses through which practices are identified and interpreted. The format is intentionally designed to hold this openness, maintaining the integrity of the project's core arguments while remaining receptive to feedback, response, and contribution. As the exhibition continues to travel and accumulate insight from across the region, the body of knowledge built collectively through this process will be revisited to respond to the larger questions the project set out to raise.