On Homji Street, Mumbai changes character every few metres. Fort has long been one of Mumbai’s centres of commerce and culture, with its grand old buildings, offices, galleries and restaurants occupying streets that have seen generations of the city come and go. It is here, on the fourth floor of Gool Mansion near Horniman Circle, that KYNKYNY has opened its first Mumbai gallery.
Founded in Bengaluru in 2004 by Namu Kini and Vivek Radhakrishnan, KYNKYNY has spent the past two decades building a programme around contemporary Indian artists, working with both emerging and established practices. Mumbai is their second city, but the founders are keen to avoid treating it as a second Bengaluru.
“Being in Fort, in such a beautiful old Art Deco building, gives the space a very particular sense of place,” Kini and Radhakrishnan say. They describe the KYNKYNY experience as “warm, approachable, and welcoming”, an ethos they want to retain as the gallery expands. At the same time, Mumbai gives them room to change. Its “scale, diversity and energy”, they say, could allow them to experiment with ideas and directions they may not have explored in Bengaluru.
The gallery’s first Mumbai exhibition, The Urban Biome, runs from August 8 to September 4 and is curated by Radhakrishnan. It brings together Krisha Bhuva, Hemanth Kumar Mavuri, N. Divya, Nivedita Shinde, Simran Yagyik and Sunil K, six artists whose practices approach the everyday from very different directions.
The exhibition starts with a fairly simple proposition: we are surrounded by things that are alive, things that were once alive, and things we have built and then learnt to live around.
The artists take that idea somewhere more personal. Divya works with inherited garments, furniture, utensils and other domestic objects as repositories of family history. Sunil K looks at insects and other creatures sharing our interiors, while Nivedita Shinde brings her training as an architect into a practice that moves between painting, drawing, stitching, writing and found materials.
For a gallery arriving in a city with an already crowded and competitive art ecosystem, that may be the more interesting proposition: to arrive without trying too hard to announce itself, and see what Mumbai changes.
What: The Urban Biome
When: Till September 4, 2026
Where: KYNKYNY, Homji Street, Horniman Circle, Mumbai
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