Much like “Beautiful things don’t ask for attention” from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, not everything that matters announces itself as art. It slips quietly into the folds of the everyday, into the kolam you step over each morning, the steel tumbler of filter coffee, the half-torn poster you no longer notice. Madras Art House by The Sunshine House, returning for its third and final chapter, begins with that quiet provocation: where did our art go?
This Chennai art show finds meaning in the ordinary.
The series, which began in January, wasn’t always meant to be a trilogy. “We began with an idea, to put a focus on the art of the now,” says curator Purple. “What if we were to put a frame on ‘what is art today’? What would it look like?” Somewhere along the way, that question expanded. Madras Art House, she explains, was never conceived as a three-part series, “funnily, the last piece of the puzzle was ‘Madras’.” What began as a broad inquiry into contemporary practice gradually rooted itself in the city, which became both backdrop and anchor. “To look at art without seeing where it’s from is to see it without context… the city Chennai… provided a silent backdrop to everything being created.”
That relationship between art and its surroundings runs deeply through the show. For artists Sneha and Veena Shree of Nayam House, the everyday is not just inspiration, but language. Their works draw from objects so familiar they risk invisibility, a crow flying off with a vadaam, a pyramid-shaped dosa, reimagined through colour and composition. “Chennai has a way of embedding art so deeply into daily life that it becomes almost invisible,” they say. “Things that are present everywhere, but easy to walk past.”
Their own journeys into art mirror this quiet accumulation. Sneha recalls growing up in an environment where “artistry was just in the air,” expressed in everything from the drape of a saree to the perspective of a sketch. “I never quite called myself an artist,” she says, describing a practice that moved from scrapbooks and calligraphy to pottery and beyond. “For me, art is a communion with the moment at hand.”
For Veena, that grounding came from watching generations of women create side by side. “When I was about six, I joined an art class, and found myself sitting in the same room as three generations of women, all drawing together,” she says. That early exposure shaped her understanding of art less as technique and more as presence. “Art, for me, has always been a form of meditation… a time spent dreaming deliberately.” Today, that sensibility translates into an experimental approach, “a conversation between the medium I pick up, the mood I want to inhabit, and the story I want to tell.”
Together, their practice becomes an act of reframing rather than reinvention. “We borrow familiar symbols… and give them a twist,” they explain. “It’s about holding something everyone already loves and saying, ‘look, isn’t this also kind of wonderful?’”
That act of looking again sits at the heart of the show’s central question. For Purple and co-curator John, “where did our art go?” is less a lament than a shift in perspective. “I’ve had so many artists ask ‘where can I find the art of today?’” Purple says. “It always catches me by surprise, when art is everywhere and they themselves make art.” What’s missing, she suggests, is not the work itself but the framing. “It’s about giving it the space that creates the realisation, ‘oh, this is art too.’”
John situates that shift within the changing identity of the city. “Madras has grown beyond just what it has been for ages,” he notes, pointing to a Chennai shaped as much by returnees and new settlers as by its past. What emerges is a city negotiating itself in real time, where “contemporary viewpoints of femininity, modernity, sexuality and cultural nature” coexist with inherited traditions. The result is not a clean transition but a layered one, “a balance between what was and what is, serving both attrition and cohesion at once.”
You see it everywhere, once you begin to look. In Margazhi music that still fills sabhas, in typography on political posters, in the geometry of window grills. “Art has always been there,” Purple says. “What’s shifted is perhaps the limelight.” Increasingly, that limelight is moving away from formal institutions to more fluid, evolving spaces. “Places like Backyard… are where art has drifted to,” she explains, describing venues that prioritise participation and process over static display.
That shift from the institutional to the intimate defines this edition. Hosted in a non-traditional space, the show brings together 13 artists in a setting that encourages interaction rather than passive viewing. “In a world of quick likes and rushed scrolls, there is something genuinely refreshing about someone stopping, looking, and sharing a real thought,” say Sneha and Veena. “That kind of exchange fills you up.” For artists working from and within the city, those responses become part of the practice itself, “hearing real experiences… feeds the work in ways nothing else can.”
Among the participants is Dr. Aishwarya Mani, whose upcycled art initiative World Over Waste transforms discarded objects into functional pieces. Her contribution to the show draws on nostalgia, using old cassettes to create lamps, décor and magnets. “We live in a world that moves very fast, where objects lose value quickly,” she says. “I’m interested in slowing that down… bringing attention back to things that once held meaning.”
Her connection to Chennai, like her material, is layered with memory. Though she grew up elsewhere, the city remains tied to formative experiences, “summers spent in my grandmother’s house… an endless summer vacation.” That sense of pause filters into her work, shaped by fragments of domestic life: kolams, kaaylaan kadais, the sound of suprabhatam on the radio. “Being part of this series has brought me back to memories I did not realise were still shaping my work,” she reflects, describing the experience as “a slow journey from outsider to insider.”
As the series draws to a close, the ambition remains intentionally understated. “We hope people take home a sense of curiosity,” Purple says. Not just about the works on display, but about the contexts that shape them, where art comes from, where it resides, and how it continues to evolve.
Because if Madras Art House suggests anything, it is this: the art never left. It simply slipped, quietly, into the everyday, waiting to be noticed.
Free entry. April 12, from 2 pm to 8 pm. At Backyard, Adyar.
Email: shivani@newindianexpress.com
X: @ShivaniIllakiya
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