Even before you start exploring Debasish Mukherjee’s latest art exhibition in New Delhi, what catches your attention is the name. Abr Kyā Chīz Hai/ What Really is a Cloud? draws from the versus of Mirza Ghalib in which he explores questions about how time, place and unseen forces shape a human. Adapting from the same concept, today, in 2026, is artist Debaish Mukherjee’s body of works, currently on display at the Akar Prakar Gallery in New Delhi. Delving deep into perception, memory and fragile architecture than shape an individual, the artworks are way deeper than what meets the eye.
In Mukherjee’s words, “What Really is a Cloud grows out of my three decades of living and working in New Delhi, years shaped by movement, memory, drifting, settling, and the quiet act of looking at the city afresh with new eyes. The exhibition is less an answer and more a lingering question.”
The works, seem to be very autobiographical in nature, tracing the timeline and movement of the artist. Broadly divided into two parts, his childhood spent in the spiritual and traditional by lanes of Benaras and Chapra and his move to New Delhi in 1994, along with the three decades that followed thereafter in the Capital that shaped much of who he is as a person and his professional growth.
Ranjit Hoskote, the curator of the exhibition points out, “Memory takes many and often startling forms in the work of Debasish Mukherjee. His practice draws from an encyclopaedic archive of sources that include experiences of burning earth and poisoned rivers, as well as images drawn from long defunct chromolithograph studios and transposed into the domain of contemporary lifestyle magazines. These works bear witness to the larger cultural, political, and material histories that underwrite the present and are always relayed through the subtle and intimate weave of autobiography.”
This body of works slowly stems from his inevitable realisation of difficulty in recalling names and remembering people, which urged him to rapidly document his memories, lest they fade away. Through his works, Delhi is seen as a catalyst, but themes like environment and politics, are also pertinent.
What: Abr Kyā Chīz Hai? / What Really is a Cloud?
Where: Akar Prakar, New Delhi
When: till March 6, 2026